Before the Rhetorical Presidency [1 ed.] 9781603446266, 9781603440714

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Before The Rhetorical Presidency

number nineteen:

Presidential Rhetoric Series Martin J. Medhurst, General Editor

Before The Rhetorical Presidency O Edited by

Martin J. Medhurst

Texas A&M University Press college station

Copyright © 2008 by Texas A&M University Press Manufactured in the United States of America All rights reserved First edition

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). Binding materials have been chosen for durability. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Before the rhetorical presidency / edited by Martin J. Medhurst. — 1st ed. p.  cm. — (Presidential rhetoric series ; no. 19) Includes index. ISBN-13: 978-1-60344-071-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-60344-071-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Presidents—United States—History—19th century. 2. Presidents—United States—Language.  3. Rhetoric—Political aspects—United States.  4. United States—Politics and government—19th century.  I. Medhurst, Martin J.  II. Series. JK511.B44 2008 973.5092'2—dc22 2008011037

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In Memory of Robert Gray Gunderson, 1915–1996 and Ronald F. Reid, 1928–2002

Contents acknowledgments



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introduction: was there a nineteenth-century rhetorical presidency? a debate revisited Martin J. Medhurst 1 part i. alternative perspectives on the rhetorical presidency Talking without Speaking, and Other Curiosities Mel Laracey On the Forms of Rhetorical Leadership Jeffrey K. Tulis Present at the Founding: The Rhetorical Presidency in Historical Perspective Stephen E. Lucas

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part ii. nineteenth-century rhetorical presidencies Little Magic: Martin Van Buren and the Politics of Gender Susan Zaeske 44 John Tyler and the Rhetoric of the Accidental Presidency David Zarefsky 63 James Knox Polk: The First Imperial President? Karlyn Kohrs Campbell 83 Franklin Pierce and the Exuberant Hauteur of an Age of Extremes: A Love Song for America in Six Movements Stephen John Hartnett 106 James Buchanan: Romancing the Union Robert E. Terrill 166 Andrew Johnson and the Politics of Character Stephen Howard Browne 194 Resolute Commander for Just Peace: The Rhetoric of Ulysses S. Grant George R. Goethals 213 The Challenges of Reunification: Rutherford B. Hayes on the Close Race and the Racial Divide Amy R. Slagell 243 The Problem with Public Memory: Benjamin Harrison Confronts the “Southern Question” Kirt H. Wilson 267

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Grover Cleveland and the Nonrhetorical Presidency Michael Leff William McKinley and the Emergence of the Modern Rhetorical Presidency William D. Harpine Afterword: Questioning the Rhetorical Presidency Construct Martin J. Medhurst Contributors Index





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Acknowledgments Most of the chapters appearing in this volume were first presented at the Texas A&M Conference on Presidential Rhetoric in the spring of 2002. Two of the chapters—those by George R. Goethals on Grant and William D. Harpine on McKinley—were commissioned especially for this collection. I wish first to thank all of the contributors to this volume, especially those who have waited six long years to see their work in print. Thanks are also due to the scholars who participated in the original conference as presenters, respondents, panel chairs, and roundtable discussants. The papers by Brooks D. Simpson and Ronald H. Carpenter do not appear in this volume, but they were crucial to the success of the conference. Equally important was the roundtable on the rhetorical presidency presented by Mary E. Stuckey, Philip Abbott, David Nichols, Frederick Antczak, William D. Harpine, and the late Ronald F. Reid. I have dedicated this volume to the memory of Ron Reid and Bob Gunderson, both of whom were personal friends of mine and long-time leaders in the study of American public address. Both published on nineteenthcentury presidents over the course of their long careers, as well as on numerous other subjects. Gunderson’s book on the 1840 presidential election, The Log-Cabin Campaign, is still regarded highly, more than fifty years after its publication. Reid’s anthology of American public address, Three Centuries of American Rhetorical Discourse, includes such presidential masterpieces as Jefferson’s first inaugural address, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and Theodore Roosevelt’s “Man with the Muck Rake.” Generations of students at Indiana University and the University of Massachusetts benefited from their scholarly example. Both were working on manuscripts about nineteenth-century presidential rhetoric at the time of their death. At the time of the conference, the faculty members affiliated with the Program in Presidential Rhetoric, a research unit in the Center for Presidential Studies at the George Bush School of Government, were Kurt Ritter, Leroy Dorsey, Enrique D. Rigsby, James Arnt Aune, Tarla Rai Peterson, Vanessa B. Beasley, and Martin J. Medhurst. We express our thanks to the George Bush

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Presidential Library Foundation, to Emil and Clementine Ogden of College Station, Texas, and to Linda and Herman Giesen of Dallas, Texas, for their many years of financial support for the Program in Presidential Rhetoric. Herman Giesen passed away in 2005. His unwavering support for the program and his determination to attend every session of every conference from 1996 to 2003 will long be remembered and appreciated. Also appreciated was the support provided by the Department of Speech Communication at Texas A&M University, including the many faculty and graduate students who helped to organize and run the conference. When this volume appears, it will be the ninth (and last) book to have been produced by the Texas A&M Conference on Presidential Rhetoric. Our thanks goes to the entire staff at Texas A&M University Press for their many years of support for this line of books: Beyond the Rhetorical Presidency (1996), Critical Reflections on the Cold War: Linking Rhetoric and History (2000), The Presidency and Rhetorical Leadership (2002), Presidential Speechwriting: From the New Deal to the Reagan Revolution and Beyond (2003), Green Talk in the White House: The Rhetorical Presidency Encounters Ecology (2004), Civil Rights Rhetoric and the American Presidency (2005), Who Belongs in America? Presidents, Rhetoric, and Immigration (2006), The Prospect of Presidential Rhetoric (2008), and the current volume Before the Rhetorical Presidency (2008). Texas A&M University Press has truly helped to put the study of presidential discourse on the academic map. I thank all of the authors who have contributed to these books, all of those who have participated in the conferences, and all of the audience members and readers, without whose presence there could be no rhetoric at all. Finally, I thank my wife, Laurel Canglose Medhurst, for her support over the course of a decade of conferences and books. Laurel hosted dinners and desserts, provided emergency transportation, critiqued every aspect of the conferences, and edited every page of my writing before it was committed to print. Her love and support is truly the wind beneath my wings.

Before the Rhetorical Presidency

Was There a Nineteenth-Century Rhetorical Presidency? A Debate Revisited martin j. medhurst

When political theorist James Ceaser and his colleagues introduced the idea of a “rhetorical presidency” in 1981, they could scarcely have imagined that three decades later the construct would still be the subject of intense debate.1 Introduced as a way of theorizing and critiquing the place of rhetoric in the conduct of the presidential office, the rhetorical presidency was a construct meant to restrain presidential appeals to popular audiences, maintain the original constitutional parameters of the presidency, and thus encourage deliberation in that branch of the government charged with careful deliberation of policy—the legislative branch. Popular appeals by presidents over the heads of Congress were, according to Ceaser and his colleagues, both dangerous (because mass publics are often excitable and uninformed) and extraconstitutional (because the Constitution does not specifically identify popular rhetorical appeals as a power of the presidential office). Furthermore, the rise of the rhetorical presidency has, according to these critics, functioned to deprive the legislative branch of its rightful powers to deliberate and enact policy by effectively transferring such deliberative powers to the people. The rhetorical presidency is thus seen as a not-so-subtle way of circumventing the separation of powers doctrine by a misappropriation of power—rhetorical power—in the presidential office.

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Before the Rhetorical Presidency speaks directly to this construct as set forth by Ceaser and his associates and expanded by one of those associates, Jeffrey Tulis, in his 1987 book The Rhetorical Presidency.2 In the twenty-plus years since the appearance of The Rhetorical Presidency there have been several noteworthy attempts to expand, challenge, contract, or modify Tulis’s theory. In particular, the works of Samuel Kernell, Roderick P. Hart, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Halford Ryan, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Mary E. Stuckey, Martin J. Medhurst, Richard J. Ellis, Leroy G. Dorsey, and Mel Laracey have contributed to this dialogue.3 Most of these works have examined the practice of the rhetorical presidency in the twentieth century. One exception to this generalization is Laracey’s 2002 book The People and the Presidency, which examines the role of the presidential newspaper in the nineteenth century. A handful of other scholars have written articles on the functioning of the rhetorical presidency prior to 1900.4 But the vast majority of scholarship on the construct has begun with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and moved forward in time to the twenty-first century. And that’s perfectly logical, since Tulis claims that the rhetorical presidency came into existence only with the Roosevelt and Wilson administrations. Yet, not all scholars of the presidency agree with this assessment. One such scholar is David Zarefsky. Writing in The Presidency and Rhetorical Leadership, Zarefsky argues that “the strategy of ‘going public’ is very old. It can be traced back to George Washington’s first term.” It was not Roosevelt and Wilson who invented the rhetorical president, Zarefsky holds, because “the idea of ‘going public’ . . . was a rhetorical instrument to enhance presidential leadership from the beginning.”5 Stephen E. Lucas agrees. Writing in the same volume, Lucas finds that George Washington clearly understood that “the presidency is inherently a rhetorical institution in which effective leadership depends not just upon the constitutional exercise of the duties of office but also upon the persuasive powers of the president vis-à-vis Congress, the people, foreign nations, the press, and even the remainder of the executive branch.”6 As Zarefsky, Lucas, and others have noted, Tulis’s ideas about rhetoric— its constitution and its functions—are rather restricted. In most of Tulis’s writings, rhetoric is construed as spoken discourse, directed to popular audiences, on matters of policy, for the purpose of forcing Congress to act without due deliberation. As I have argued elsewhere, and as the chapters in this book will illustrate, each of these conceptualizations is problematic. The first problem is that rhetoric is not restricted to the spoken word. Indeed, any means of symbolic inducement may be rhetoric if it is designed to influence or persuade an audience.7 Second, rhetorical discourse is not restricted

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to those messages directed to popular or mass audiences. As Lucas and others have noted, rhetoric can even be addressed to other actors within a president’s own administration. Audiences may consist of one or two people, specialized experts, or even those who overhear the message. Thus matters such as size of the audience, nature of the audience, or whether exposure to the discourse is direct or indirect have no bearing on whether rhetoric is being practiced. Third, rhetoric is broader than just appeals concerning policy—what Aristotle called deliberative address. Even ceremonial speaking, as Lucas and others note in this volume, may have policy implications. To ignore such speaking merely because it does not discuss policy directly is both to misconstrue the art of rhetoric and to miss important ways in which presidential purposes are achieved. And finally, although presidents may have as their primary purpose the goal of forcing congressional action, that is but one of any number of potential purposes rhetorical discourse can serve. Indeed, one recent essay identifies twelve distinct purposes that presidential rhetoric serves on a regular basis.8 Rhetoric is best conceived as a natural capacity that all human beings, even presidents, possess. As with other capacities, some people are more blessed than others with that natural ability, or with specialized rhetorical education, or with multiple opportunities to practice their persuasive skills. As a natural capacity, rhetoric is neither moral nor immoral. It is, as Aristotle pointed out long ago, amoral. It is a capacity that can be used for good or evil, used well or poorly, employed effectively or ineffectively. To protest that presidents make ever-increasing use of a natural capacity seems misguided. To raise the issue to the level of constitutional interpretation is both to add an extralegal test to the Constitution and to ignore U.S. history. The Constitution does not forbid the use of presidential rhetoric (nor could it, as long as a democratic republic is envisioned). U.S. history, even the nineteenth century, is replete with the use of presidential rhetoric, even that kind of rhetoric often disparaged as constituting the rhetorical presidency. And that is precisely what this anthology is about—how selected presidents from the nineteenth century enacted the rhetorical presidency decades before its supposed onset. Thus, the title of this volume—Before the Rhetorical Presidency—is to be understood as referring to Tulis’s construct and not merely to the practice of presidential rhetoric.9 We are interested in those presidencies before Tulis’s identification of the beginning of the rhetorical presidency in the early years of the twentieth century. Our argument is clear: there was a rhetorical presidency—perhaps several different rhetorical presidencies—long before Roosevelt and Wilson, and those rhetorical presidencies can be seen in the practices and procedures of many holders of the presidential office, beginning with George Washington.

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If this argument can be sustained, then both the history and theory of the rhetorical presidency will need to be reconsidered.

studies of nineteenth-century presidential rhetoric Studies of the rhetorical dimensions of presidential administrations prior to 1900 have been relatively scarce. In 1957, Robert G. Gunderson produced The Log-Cabin Campaign, a path-breaking book on the rhetoric of the 1840 presidential election. Twenty years later, Roderick P. Hart wrote The Political Pulpit, in which he used presidential rhetoric to illustrate his theory of the “rhetorical compact” between religion and government. Hart’s book made only passing references to Washington and Jefferson but did survey early presidential inaugural addresses. Waldo W. Braden produced a slim volume, Abraham Lincoln: Public Speaker, in 1989. The following year, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson wrote Deeds Done in Words, which explored the generic and formal dimensions of recurring types of presidential rhetoric—inaugurals, state of the union addresses, veto messages, impeachment discourse, war rhetoric, and farewell addresses, often drawing examples from the nineteenth century. That same year, David Zaresfky published Lincoln, Douglas and Slavery: In the Crucible of Public Debate. Although focused on the prepresidential Lincoln, this work identified the types of arguments that were in use immediately prior to and during Lincoln’s term of office. Mary E. Stuckey devoted one chapter of her 1991 work, The President as Interpreter-in-Chief, to what she termed the “premodern United States.” Lois J. Einhorn wrote Abraham Lincoln the Orator in 1992. In 2002, James L. Golden and Alan L. Golden published Thomas Jefferson and the Rhetoric of Virtue, the first full-length study of Jefferson’s rhetorical acumen. And in his 2002 work The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate, Kirt H. Wilson touched on the rhetoric of presidents Grant, Hayes, and Benjamin Harrison, although his focus was, quite naturally, on the congressional debates. By contrast, Stephen Howard Browne’s 2003 book Jefferson’s Call for Nationhood focused entirely on the first inaugural address of 1801. And in 2005, William D. Harpine produced From the Front Porch to the Front Page: McKinley and Bryan in the 1896 Presidential Campaign.10 If we move from books to journal articles or book chapters the picture is much the same. With the notable exception of studies on Abraham Lincoln, twentieth-century rhetorical scholarship on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century presidencies has been rather meager.

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The plain fact is that some of the presidents represented in this volume—Van Buren, Tyler, Pierce, Buchanan, Grant, Hayes, and Harrison— have never before been subjected to sustained rhetorical analysis. Still others have been studied on only a limited basis.11This relatively small number of studies should not obscure the outstanding quality of much of the work that has been done. Starting in the 1930s with studies by Mildred Freburg Berry and Earl Wiley on Abraham Lincoln, rhetorical scholars have produced a small but powerful group of articles and chapters on selected eighteenth- and nineteenth-century presidencies. To encounter the work of Stephen E. Lucas on George Washington and the American Revolution is to be swept into the world of the eighteenth-century United States and the rhetorical norms that produced such masterpieces as the Declaration of Independence, Washington’s first inaugural address, and Washington’s Farewell Address.12 To read James M. Farrell on John Adams or Stephen Howard Browne on Thomas Jefferson is to encounter powerful minds that see deeply into their subjects.13 And Abraham Lincoln’s rhetoric, initially explored by Berry and Wiley, has in more recent years been the intellectual terrain of such outstanding scholars as David Zarefsky, Michael Leff, Edwin Black, and Michael William Pfau.14 Indeed, the main reason that Lincoln is excluded from this collection is due to the distinctive scholarship on his rhetoric that already exists.15 By focusing on rhetoric and the presidency, I in no way wish to disparage or discount the foundational works of historians and political scientists. Indeed, any meaningful study of rhetorical discourse must be a study of texts in context. The contextual scholarship of Gordon S. Wood, Joseph J. Ellis, Forrest McDonald, Bernard Bailyn, and others during the Founding era has proven invaluable to rhetorical analysts. The life-long work of Robert V. Remini in the Jacksonian era and of Allan Nevins and William Freehling on the years leading up to the Civil War has been crucial to scholars in many fields. And though there is no chapter on Lincoln in this volume, we are all in the debt of such scholars as James M. McPherson, David Herbert Donald, Stephen B. Oates and others who have written so powerfully about our sixteenth president. Scholars of the Reconstruction era such as Brooks D. Simpson and William S. McFeely have added important insights to our knowledge as have Lewis L. Gould and H. W. Brands on the later years of the nineteenth century. In this volume we add a rhetorical perspective to the study of presidential history in the belief that such an approach can not only add depth but possibly change the dominant perceptions of some of our lesser-known chief executives.

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preview of the chapters The chapters in this volume are divided into two parts. In Part I, Mel Laracey, Jeffrey Tulis, and Stephen E. Lucas set forth alternative perspectives on the rhetorical presidency. In Part II, leading scholars of nineteenth-century rhetoric examine the rhetorical presidencies of Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, James K. Polk, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, and William McKinley. Chapter 1 begins with Laracey setting forth an abbreviated version of his challenge to the reigning orthodoxy concerning the rhetorical presidency. In short, Laracey holds that Tulis was wrong when he argued in his 1987 book The Rhetorical Presidency that only one nineteenth-century president had engaged in “going public.” Furthermore, Laracey contends that Tulis was also mistaken about the existence of a “constitutionally based norm” that proscribed a president from making direct public appeals on matters of government policy. Not only did half of the nineteenth-century presidents “go public,” thus becoming rhetorical presidents, but they did so using means other than public speech and in a manner fully consistent with at least one vision of the presidency held by the Founders. In Chapter 2, Jeffrey Tulis answers Laracey’s charges and contends that far from disproving his thesis, Laracey has actually reinforced and confirmed the central argument of Tulis’s work by admitting “that hardly any presidents . . . went public by making speeches about policy-related matters.” Although Tulis acknowledges that many nineteenth-century presidents used a presidential newspaper to disseminate their views, he nonetheless finds that practice substantively and formally different from his meaning of “going public.” “The significance of form may be neglected by Laracey,” Tulis writes, “but it was well understood by presidents and their publics in the nineteenth century.” So strong was the constitutional norm, Tulis holds, that “direct oral performances before the people, except on extraordinary occasions, was thought to undermine the status of the president as a constitutional officer.” In Chapter 3, Lucas complicates matters even further. If it is true that public speaking compromised the presidential office, Lucas asks, then why did George Washington make his first official act the delivery of an inaugural address? And why did Washington and Adams deliver all of their annual messages orally and in person? Lucas notes that Washington was a “master of political ceremony” who “staged the presentation of his speeches with great

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care.” It may well be the case, Lucas concedes, that “nineteenth-century presidents, in Tulis’s words, ‘assumed that written messages were constitutionally prescribed,’ but it is erroneous to claim that their assumption reflected the Founders’ view of the Constitution.” Lucas agrees with Tulis that there are both substantive and formal differences among eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century presidential attitudes and practices with respect to rhetoric. The rhetorical presidency was enacted differently, Lucas holds, but it was nonetheless enacted, starting with George Washington. These three pointing essays set forth the contours of the argument. It is a complex argument that has at least four distinct dimensions: constitutional, historical, rhetorical, and consequential. For Tulis the primary concerns are constitutional and consequential. He believes that the Constitution was designed to discourage, if not directly prohibit, the president from making policy appeals to the general public. When presidents make such appeals, they fly in the face of constitutional design and the Founders’ intent for how the presidential office ought to be conducted. As a consequence of this “extra”constitutional behavior, the powers of Congress are diluted, the presidential office is transformed into a creature that it was not intended to be, and the deliberative function reserved for the legislative branch of government is hijacked and short-circuited by publics that are both ignorant and easily manipulated. For Laracey the problems are primarily historical and constitutional. He holds that history shows us that many presidents, almost from the beginning of the republic, sought out ways to communicate their views to the general public. The primary way in which this was done between 1800 and 1860 was through the presidential newspaper. In addition, presidents used public tours, letters, published speeches, and pamphlets to set forth their views on the issues of the day. Since presidents readily and repeatedly engaged in these communicative activities, Laracey sees no evidence of a “constitutionally based norm” proscribing direct communication with the public on policy matters. He does see several rhetorical norms at work in different time periods, but he insists that history itself proves that the argument from constitutional design and intent fails. Furthermore, unlike Tulis, Laracey sees the consequences of presidential communication to the public as largely beneficial. For Lucas the primary issues are rhetorical and historical. Like Laracey, Lucas recognizes that the art of rhetoric is not limited to public speaking. Like Tulis, he sees a difference between the ways the presidency was enacted in the nineteenth century and the ways in which it has been enacted in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But to Lucas, these are difference in

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degree rather than in kind. Rhetoric, as a natural human capacity, is ubiquitous. Humans are rhetorical by nature, and presidents are no exception. To understand the nature of rhetoric is to understand why all presidents have had the impulse to “go public” at one time or another. That they have done so at different rates, using different media, targeting different audiences, and employing different rhetorical forms comes as no surprise. Rhetoric is always the handmaiden of history. It operates within historical situations to transform history. Careful historical study of rhetorical theories and forms can teach us much about how any particular president enacted the rhetorical presidency. For Lucas, it is rhetorical theory and historical practice, not constitutional theory, that best accounts for presidential modes of communication. Even these distinctions may not capture all of the complexity in the topic. By constitutional, do we mean what is literally written in the document, or how it has been interpreted? And by whom? Both Laracey and Tulis speak to these issues. By historical, do we mean facts or interpretations of facts? And is that distinction even meaningful? Tulis says there was only one rhetorical president in the nineteenth century. Laracey says there were eleven; but Laracey’s eleven do not correspond in all cases with the eleven presidents presented in this volume. So were there really twelve or thirteen, or were all of our presidents rhetorical in some way? Clearly the answers to such questions rest largely on matters of definition and interpretation. By rhetorical, do we mean only public speeches or the use of any symbolic form to influence thought and action? The first definition seems overly narrow, but is the second overly broad? If rhetoric can be anything and everything, has it thereby lost its value as a heuristic tool? Even consequences are debatable. If the rhetorical presidency is inevitably bad, how do we make sense of Lincoln’s first and second inaugural addresses and his speech at Gettysburg? Was Grant’s rhetoric during Reconstruction too much or too little? Was it too explicit and directive, or not nearly enough so? Could Hayes or Harrison have done anything different rhetorically to change the consequences of their predecessors’ rhetorical choices? These are difficult questions. The constitutional, historical, rhetorical, and consequential aspects of the rhetorical presidency will continue to be debated. We offer the chapters that follow in Part II as another voice in that debate. Each examines one aspect of the rhetorical behavior of the president under investigation. Susan Zaeske examines the single term of Martin Van Buren from the perspective of publics in general and the female public in particular. Focusing on how Van Buren responded rhetorically to the issues of abolition and

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Indian removal, Zaeske explores “the effects of a diverse public on the power of the executive office.” Even though women did not have the vote, they did have rhetorical power through their ability to engage in protest, launch petition campaigns, and participate in other forms of “pressure . . . to alter the administration’s policy.” As a consequence of these activities, Zaeske finds that Van Buren spent most of his rhetorical energy defending himself and his policies. Van Buren failed to recognize the changing dynamics of the public, especially as those dynamics involved women and other leaders of evangelical reform movements. Consequently, Van Buren became trapped by his own ideology; he failed to understand—or to rhetorically adapt to—the rapidly changing circumstances of democratic governance. David Zarefsky investigates the rhetorical presidency of John Tyler, a vice president who came to the presidency upon the death of William Henry Harrison. Unlike most commentators on the Tyler presidency, Zarefsky finds both constitutional and rhetorical reasons to praise Tyler’s leadership. Constitutionally, Tyler helped to establish the principle of executive independence from both Congress and party. In addition, Tyler reinforced and expanded the use of the veto as a source of presidential authority. Rhetorically, Tyler is interesting primarily because he conducted “a sustained persuasive campaign” that “culminated in the annexation of Texas.” Zarefsky argues that Tyler understood the “rhetorical power of defining the situation,” and used that power to achieve his ends. Tyler also “took advantage of ambiguity” in both constitutional law and congressional procedure to secure the admission of Texas as a state. Tyler’s rhetorical arsenal included “defining the situation, emphasizing certain arguments and deemphasizing others, invoking the locus of the irreparable, conducting a persuasive campaign, developing a hierarchy of ends over means, and claiming broad public support.” On the biggest issue of his presidency, Zarefsky argues, Tyler did provide effective rhetorical leadership. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell analyzes the presidency of James K. Polk and finds it to be a forerunner of the imperial presidency of the twentieth century. Even though Polk professed to believe in “the unique legitimacy of the president as a legislative leader and representative of all the people” neither he nor his administration made any discernible effort to ascertain that will, choosing instead to believe that his election (by a small margin) meant that his program was automatically in line with the people’s will. His rhetoric followed accordingly and, according to Campbell, “provided a rationale for the evolution of the imperial presidency.” Campbell identifies four issues that defined Polk’s term in office—Jeffersonianism, presidential power, Manifest

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Destiny, and slavery—and shows how the president tried to use his annual messages “to justify his legislative initiatives and to mobilize public opinion in their support.” In this effort, he failed, leaving only the imperialistic character of his administration as a legacy. Stephen John Hartnett conducts a cultural and rhetorical autopsy of Franklin Pierce’s presidency. Elected in 1852 “to defend the solid middle ground of moderation,” Pierce quickly evolved into an apologist for the southern slave power. By the end of his term, according to Hartnett, Pierce had become “one of the chief proponents of an extremist proslavery version of states’ rights.” Rhetorically, Hartnett judges Pierce to have been a disaster as he sought “refuge in the rhetoric of vague constitutionalism.” Not willing to draw distinctions between and among competing viewpoints, Pierce chose “to avoid politics in favor of the language of gentlemanly decorum.” He took refuge in “Jacksonian dogma,” which he regularly invoked “like a prayer warding off the evils of change and uncertainty.” By willfully closing his eyes to the turbulence surrounding him, Hartnett charges, Pierce helped to exacerbate the forces of national disintegration. Robert E. Terrill investigates another president who contributed to the dissolution of the Union, James M. Buchanan. According to Terrill, Buchanan’s “particular failures as a president were a function of his rhetoric.” Terrill argues that Buchanan “romanced the Union, placing it upon an unapproachable pedestal and thus rendering it imperious to rhetorical engagement.” To bolster his argument, Terrill turns to Buchanan’s early life and his failed romantic relationship with Ann Coleman, which he treats “as a metaphor for Buchanan’s own political anxieties.” Terrill then identifies what he calls topics of “repression” in Buchanan’s discourse, each of which names “a set of motives through which forces potentially harmful to the placid and inert beauty of the Union might be kept at bay.” Buchanan’s rhetoric, like his romantic endeavors, failed to win adherence. Stephen Howard Browne examines another of the “worst” presidents in the person of Andrew Johnson. Based on the premise that most studies of the rhetorical presidency have focused on the president’s logos, Browne turns his lens to ethos, “the rhetorical construction of Johnson’s character,” as a means of expanding our understanding of the interface between rhetoric and the presidency. That Johnson was, in many ways, his own worst enemy is clear. Browne traces the destruction of Johnson’s ethos, from his inebriated address upon accepting the vice presidency to his embarrassing harangues during his swing around the circle in an effort to save his presidency. But Johnson had more than a little help in the rhetorical construction of his character from

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the press and rival politicians. Browne examines this rhetoric about Johnson as well as the president’s own responses. In the end, Browne concludes that Johnson’s enactment of the presidency was “ill-suited in almost every possible way to the standards of performance requisite to its success.” As both rhetor and statesman, Johnson is found wanting. George R. Goethals is the first to admit that Ulysses S. Grant is also rated as a “failure” by many historians. But Goethals believes that “recent research” challenges this historical wisdom and that Grant, though far from perfect, is deserving of another look, one based, in part, on a study of his rhetoric. Goethals argues that “Grant’s rhetoric consistently presses for measures that will yield peace, order, justice, prosperity, and honesty and competence in government.” And in two areas, economics and foreign policy, that rhetoric proved successful. Even in those areas where Grant’s rhetoric was ultimately a failure—Reconstruction and the treatment of Native Americans, for example—his ethical stance was laudatory, especially by the standards of the 1870s. Although numerous scandals plagued his administration, Grant conducted himself in a manner that was rhetorically praiseworthy, if not always successful in attaining his goals. Amy R. Slagell provides the first rhetorical analysis of the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes. A former general in the Union Army, Hayes came to office just as the enforcement of Reconstruction measures was beginning to end. According to Slagell, Hayes used “all manner of persuasive tools” to bring about “reconciliation and the reestablishment of the Union.” To accomplish this, Hayes adopted the rhetoric of unity. Although he repeatedly defended the Reconstruction amendments and called for the equal treatment of African Americans, Hayes had “an optimism to his discourse that suggests a kind of rhetoric of delusion,” according to Slagell. Hayes made repeated trips around the country to reinforce the need for unity and brotherhood, yet he failed to “grasp the depth of racist feeling” and “the impossibility of curing it through appeal to the rule of law.” Slagell finds that Hayes inherited a rhetorical situation “that tested the limits of the changes rhetoric can bring about.” As with his predecessor Grant and his successor Benjamin Harrison, the issue with Hayes was not the rhetoric used but rather the flawed political judgment that gave rise to the rhetoric in the first place. Kirt H. Wilson focuses his attention on Benjamin Harrison. Like Hayes, Harrison displayed an “unwillingness to challenge the increasingly sanitized interpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction,” even though Harrison had “skills as an orator.” Indeed, Wilson reports that Harrison spoke publicly some 296 times during his term of office and that through public speaking,

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national tours, and judicious use of the press, Harrison’s “ideas went before the American public almost daily.” Yet, according to Wilson, Harrison “never seemed to benefit politically from his skills as an orator.” Certainly, he was never able to secure for African Americans the “equal rights” and “public prosperity” that he touted in his speaking. Wilson laments the fact that a man who had “exactly those resources necessary to challenge public memory and reintroduce the claim that European Americans had a moral and political obligation to advance black rights” failed to do either. Harrison could champion a generalized “equal rights,” but could not bring himself to champion black rights in the face of northern apathy and southern intransigence. Michael Leff takes the second administration of Grover Cleveland as his case study. Leff is interested in the distinction that Tulis makes between deliberative rhetoric and popular rhetoric. Tulis identifies deliberative rhetoric with the nineteenth century and popular rhetoric with the twentieth, praising the former and criticizing the latter. But Leff uses what he calls the “nonrhetorical or perhaps antirhetorical” presidency of Grover Cleveland as a case study in the conditions necessary for any kind of rhetoric—deliberative or popular—to work. The main condition is the willingness to engage the other in argumentation. Leff sees Cleveland as a president who “virtually embodied Victorian liberalism as it existed in late-nineteenth-century America.” One aspect of this liberalism was the belief that the sovereign was above politics, above the hurly burly of the street. Leff uses as his example Cleveland’s interactions (one can hardly call it a debate) with Governor John P. Altgeld of Illinois concerning the use of federal troops to police a union action in the city of Chicago. Leff finds in the rhetorical exchange evidence that even in an age characterized by deliberative rhetoric, presidents had the power to thwart deliberation merely by refusing to participate in the argument. Cleveland could adopt such a stance because of the political norms then in place. By the time of Woodrow Wilson, those norms had changed, and the rhetoric practiced by presidents had changed with it. William D. Harpine completes the volume with a study of the last president of the nineteenth century, William McKinley. Harpine claims that McKinley “clearly understood the importance of swaying public opinion toward his views” and that he used various instrumentalities to do so, starting with his famous front porch campaign in 1896. But what Harpine finds is that McKinley did not govern as a rhetorical president during the first two years of his presidency. Even during the height of the Spanish-American War in 1898, McKinley did not address policy speeches to the general public. Yet immediately after the war’s completion, McKinley began to employ

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what Harpine identifies as argument “by implication.” McKinley’s speeches sounded “ceremonial,” Harpine argues, “but implied programmatic ideas.” Such speeches persuaded “without seeming to persuade.” This they did by utilizing “traditional American values,” values that were associated with McKinley’s policies. By securing agreement on the values, then linking his policies implicitly with those values, McKinley was able to advocate without seeming to argue. As Harpine notes, “his advocacy avoided the usual methods of deliberative rhetoric” throughout most of his presidency. As early as 1899, however, Harpine finds a more direct rhetorical presidency starting to emerge in McKinley’s discourse. This tendency finds its strongest expression in the speech that McKinley gave one day before his assassination in 1901. For Harpine, the rhetorical presidency “emerged over time,” even across the administrations of William McKinley. In a brief afterword, I try to identify some of the issues raised by the chapters in this volume and then to relate those issues to the larger debate about the rhetorical presidency. My suspicion is that this book will not end debate about the rhetorical presidency—nor should it. I do hope that it will open some new avenues for consideration, both by advocates and detractors of “going public.”

notes 1. James W. Ceaser, Glen E. Thurow, Jeffrey Tulis, and Joseph M. Bessette, “The Rise of the Rhetorical Presidency,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 11 (1981): 158–71. Further elaborations include Glen Thurow and Jeffrey D. Wallin, eds., Rhetoric and American Statesmanship (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1984); James W. Ceaser, “The Rhetorical Presidency Revisited,” in Modern Presidents and the Presidency, ed. Marc Landy (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1985), 15–34; Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987). 2. See Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency; Jeffrey K. Tulis, “Revising the Rhetorical Presidency,” in Beyond the Rhetorical Presidency, ed. Martin J. Medhurst (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996), 3–14; Jeffrey K. Tulis, “Reflections on the Rhetorical Presidency in American Political Development,” in Speaking to the People: The Rhetorical Presidency in Historical Perspective, ed. Richard J. Ellis (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 211–22. 3. See Samuel Kernell, Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential Leadership (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1986); Roderick P. Hart, The Sound of Leadership: Presidential Communication in the Modern Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Eloquence in an Electronic Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Halford Ryan, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Rhetorical Presidency (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988); Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Deeds

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Done in Words: Presidential Rhetoric and the Genres of Governance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Mary E. Stuckey, The President as Interpreter-in-Chief (New York: Chatham House, 1991); Halford Ryan, ed., U.S. Presidents as Orators: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995); Medhurst, Beyond the Rhetorical Presidency; Ellis, Speaking to the People; Leroy G. Dorsey, ed., The Presidency and Rhetorical Leadership (College Station: Texas A&M University, 2002); Mel Laracey, Presidents and the People: The Partisan Story of Going Public (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002). 4. See Richard J. Ellis and Alexis Walker, “Policy Speech in the Nineteenth-Century Rhetorical Presidency: The Case of Zachary Taylor’s 1849 Tour,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 37 (2007): 248–69; Karen S. Hoffman, “‘Going Public’ in the 19th Century: Grover Cleveland’s Repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5 (2002): 57–77; Lyon Rathbun, “The Debate over Annexing Texas and the Emergence of Manifest Destiny,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 4 (2001): 459–93. Also of interest is David Zarefsky, “Henry Clay and the Election of 1844: The Limits of a Rhetoric of Compromise,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6 (2003): 79–96. 5. David Zarefsky, “The Presidency Has Always Been a Place for Rhetorical Leadership,” in The Presidency and Rhetorical Leadership, 31–32. 6. Stephen E. Lucas, “George Washington and the Rhetoric of Presidential Leadership,” in The Presidency and Rhetorical Leadership, 44. 7. For a classic statement on the scope of rhetoric see Thomas O. Sloan, et al., “Report of the Committee on the Advancement and Refinement of Rhetorical Criticism,” in The Prospect of Rhetoric, ed. Lloyd F. Bitzer and Edwin Black (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 220–27. On rhetoric as symbolic inducement see Richard B. Gregg, “The Criticism of Symbolic Inducement: A Critical-Theoretical Connection,” in Speech Communication in the 20th Century, ed. Thomas W. Benson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 41–62; Martin J. Medhurst and Thomas W. Benson, “Rhetorical Studies in a Media Age,” in Rhetorical Dimensions in Media: A Critical Casebook, 2nd ed., ed. Martin J. Medhurst and Thomas W. Benson (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1991), ix–xxiii. 8. See Martin J. Medhurst, “Rhetorical Leadership and the Presidency: A Situational Taxonomy,” in The Values of Presidential Leadership, ed. Terry L. Price and J. Thomas Wren (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2007), 59–84 9. On the distinction between the rhetorical presidency and presidential rhetoric see Martin J. Medhurst, “A Tale of Two Constructs: The Rhetorical Presidency versus Presidential Rhetoric,” in Beyond the Rhetorical Presidency, xi–xxv. 10. Robert Gray Gunderson, The Log Cabin Campaign (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1957); Roderick P. Hart, The Political Pulpit (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1977); Waldo W. Braden, Abraham Lincoln: Public Speaker (Baton Rouge; Louisiana State University Press, 1989); Campbell and Jamieson, Deeds Done in Words; David Zarefsky, Lincoln, Douglas, and Slavery: In the Crucible of Public Debate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Stuckey, The President as Interpreter-in-Chief; Lois J. Einhorn, Abraham Lincoln the Orator (Westport, Conn.; Greenwood Press, 1992); James L. Golden and Alan L. Golden, Thomas Jefferson and the Rhetoric of Virtue (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002); Kirt H. Wilson, The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002); Stephen Howard Browne, Jefferson’s Call for Nationhood (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003); William D. Harpine, From the Front Porch to the Front Page: McKinley and Bryan in the 1896 Presidential Campaign (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005). 11. Prior rhetorical studies of the presidents who appear in this volume include Rathbun, “The Debate over Annexing Texas”; Robert L. Ivie, “Progressive Form and Mexican Culpability in Polk’s Justification for War,” Central States Speech Journal 30 (1979): 311–20;

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Gregg Phifer, “‘Not for the Purpose of Making a Speech’: Andrew Johnson’s Swing around the Circle,” Speech Monographs 21 (1954): 285–94; Gregg Phifer, “Andrew Johnson at Cleveland and St. Louis, 1866: A Study in Textual Authenticity,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 37 (1951): 455–63; Wyman W. Parker, “Rutherford B. Hayes as a Student of Speech at Kenyon College,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 39 (1953): 291–96; Hoffman, “Going Public in the 19th Century”; Robert L. Ivie, “William McKinley: Advocate of Imperialism,” Western Speech 36 (1972): 15–23; William D. Harpine, “Playing to the Press in McKinley’s Front Porch Campaign: The Early Weeks of a Nineteenth-Century Pseudo-Event,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30 (2000): 73–90; William D. Harpine, “‘We Want Yer, McKinley’: Epideictic Rhetoric in Songs from the 1896 Presidential Campaign,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 24 (2004): 73–88. 12. See Stephen E. Lucas, “George Washington and the Rhetoric of Presidential Leadership,” in The Presidency and Rhetorical Leadership, 42–72; Stephen E. Lucas, “The Declaration of Independence in the Rhetoric of American Politics,” in The Changing American Conversation: Lectures from the Smithsonian, ed. William Eadie and Paul Nelson (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Press, 2002), 39–59; Stephen E. Lucas, ed. and comp., The Quotable George Washington: The Wisdom of an American Patriot (Madison, Wis.: Madison House, 1999); Stephen E. Lucas, “The Rhetorical Ancestry of the Declaration of Independence,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 1 (1998): 143–84; Stephen E. Lucas and Susan Zaeske, “George Washington,” in U.S. Presidents as Orators, 3–17; Stephen E. Lucas, “The Stylistic Artistry of the Declaration of Independence,” Prologue 22 (Spring 1990): 25–43; Stephen E. Lucas, “Justifying America: The Declaration of Independence as a Rhetorical Document,” in American Rhetoric: Context and Criticism, ed. Thomas W. Benson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 67–130; Stephen E. Lucas, “Genre Criticism and Historical Context: The Case of George Washington’s First Inaugural Address,” Southern Speech Communication Journal 51 (1986): 354–70; Stephen E. Lucas, Portents of Rebellion: Rhetoric and Revolution in Philadelphia, 1765–1776 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976). 13. James M. Farrell, “Writs of Assistance and Public Memory: John Adams and the Legacy of James Otis,” New England Quarterly 79 (2006): 533–56; James M. Farrell, “‘Cherish’ is the Word: John Adams, The New Hampshire Constitution, and Public Education,” Historical New Hampshire 59 (Fall 2005): 130–37; James M. Farrell, “Classical Virtue and Presidential Fame: John Adams, Leadership, and the Franco-American Crisis,” in The Presidency and Rhetorical Leadership, 73–94; James M. Farrell, “John Adams,” in U.S. Presidents as Orators, 18–27; James M. Farrell, “Letters and Political Judgment: John Adams and Cicero’s Style,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 24 (1994): 137–53; James M. Farrell, “New England’s Cicero: John Adams and the Rhetoric of Conspiracy,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 104 (1992): 55–72; James M. Farrell, “‘Syren Tully’ and the Young John Adams,” Classical Journal 87 (1992): 373–90; James M. Farrell, “Pro Militibus Oratio: John Adams’ Imitation of Cicero in the Boston Massacre Trial,” Rhetorica 9 (1991): 233–49; James M. Farrell, “John Adams’s Autobiography: The Ciceronian Paradigm and the Quest for Fame,” New England Quarterly 62 (1989): 505–28; Stephen Howard Browne, Thomas Jefferson’s Call for Nationhood; Stephen Howard Browne, “Jefferson’s First Declaration of Independence: A Summary View of the Rights of British America Revisited,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 235–52; Stephen Howard Browne, “‘The Circle of Our Felicities’: Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address and the Rhetoric of Nationhood,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5 (2002): 409–38. 14. See David Zarefsky, “Lincoln’s 1862 Annual Message: A Paradigm of Rhetorical Leadership,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 3 (2000): 5–14; David Zarefsky, “Consistency and Change in Lincoln’s Rhetoric about Equality,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 1 (1998): 21–40; David Zarefsky, “‘Public Sentiment is Everything’: Lincoln’s View of Political Persuasion,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 15 (1994): 23–40; David Zarefsky, “Lincoln and Douglas Respond to the Antislavery Movement,” in Rhetorical Movement: Essays in Honor of

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Leland M. Griffin, ed. David Zarefsky (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 112–30; David Zarefsky, Lincoln, Douglas, and Slavery; David Zarefsky, “Approaching Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address,” Communication Reports 1 (1988): 9–13; David Zarefsky, “The Lincoln-Douglas Debates Revisited: The Evolution of Public Argument,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986): 162–84; Michael Leff, “Lincoln at Cooper Union: Neo-Classicism Revisited,” Western Journal of Communication 65 (2001): 323–48; Michael Leff and Jean Goodwin, “Dialogic Figures and Dialectical Argument in Lincoln’s Rhetoric,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 3 (2000): 59–69; Michael Leff, “Lincoln Among the Nineteenth-Century Orators,” in Rhetoric and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Thomas W. Benson (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997), 131–56; Michael Leff, “Dimensions of Temporality in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural,” Communication Reports 1 (1988): 26–31; Michael Leff, “Rhetorical Timing in Lincoln’s ‘House Divided’ Speech,” The Van Zelst Lecture in Communication (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University School of Speech, 1984), 1–24; Michael Leff and G. P. Mohrmann, “Lincoln at Cooper Union: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Text,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 60 (1974): 346–58; Edwin Black, “The Ultimate Voice of Lincoln,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 3 (2003): 49–57; Edwin Black, “Gettysburg and Silence,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (2004): 21–36; Michael William Pfau, “Evaluating Conspiracy: Narrative, Argument and Ideology in Lincoln’s ‘House Divided’ Speech,” Argumentation & Advocacy 42 (2005): 57–73; Michael William Pfau, The Political Style of Conspiracy: Chase, Sumner, and Lincoln (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005); Michael William Pfau, “The House That Abe Built: The ‘House Divided’ Speech and Republican Party Politics,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 2 (1999): 625–51. 15. See Michael Leff, ed., [Special Issue on Lincoln] Rhetoric & Public Affairs 3 (2000): 1–69. This special issue includes articles by David Zarefsky, Kirt H. Wilson, Martha Watson, Edwin Black, Michael Leff and Jean Goodwin. For recent scholarship on Lincoln’s rhetoric produced by historians and others see Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That ReMade America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992); Ronald C. White Jr., Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002); James Tackach, Lincoln’s Moral Vision: The Second Inaugural Address (University: University Press of Mississippi, 2002); Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004); Ronald C. White Jr., The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln through His Words (New York: Random House, 2005); Douglas L. Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words (New York: Knopf, 2006); Harold Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006); Gabor Boritt, The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006).



Part I

Alternative Perspectives on the Rhetorical Presidency

Talking without Speaking, and Other Curiosities mel laracey

One of the most notable works in the fields of presidential and rhetorical studies in the past twenty years has been Jeffrey Tulis’s The Rhetorical Presidency (1987). With the publication of that book, some topics essentially became closed to further scholarly discussion. In my book, Presidents and the People: The Partisan Story of Going Public (2002), I seek to reopen those topics. The two main topics I reexamine are, first, whether virtually all nineteenth-century presidents did actually avoid communicating directly with the people on policy issues—what we now call going public; and, second, whether there really was a universally held, constitutionally based norm that presidents direct their communications on policy matters to Congress and not to the people. These topics ceased to be discussed much after the publication of The Rhetorical Presidency because the arguments presented in that book seemed so compelling.1 After all, it really was true, as Professor Tulis pointed out, that hardly any presidents—he cited just Andrew Johnson—went public by making speeches about policy-related matters. And it really was true that Andrew Johnson wound up getting impeached after making a wild speaking tour around the country. And there are passages in the Federalist Papers that speak of the dangers of demagoguery. Although these passages never refer specifically to the president and present a somewhat confusing distinction

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between “good” and “bad” demagogues, they can be read to mean that all public officials, including presidents, should avoid speaking to the public about policy matters. And finally, some nineteenth-century presidents did make statements that, at first glance and taken out of context, can also be read to support this position. But can it really be true that almost all pre-twentieth-century presidents were so different from those who followed them? After all, if, as Richard Neustadt observed, “presidential power is the power to persuade,” is it plausible that all the presidents (except Andrew Johnson) during the first century of our government’s existence made no effort at public persuasion on policy matters?2 Moreover, the nineteenth century was not exactly a quiet time politically. It has been described by Philip Abbott as “a period, especially at its close, of intense political participation and partisan organization.”3 Would all the presidents really have stayed quiet in such a time? It was with these sorts of questions in mind that I set out several years ago to reexamine the attitudes and behavior of all the pre-twentieth-century presidents concerning their public involvement in the national policymaking process. My reexamination produced some significantly different conclusions about presidential communication behavior in the nineteenth century. Let me start out with one big difference in my findings from those of Professor Tulis. I found that eleven presidents, not just one, went public in the nineteenth century, while an equal number, eleven, did not. Put another way, instead of fewer than 5 percent of the twenty-two presidents in the nineteenth century going public, 50 percent did. What accounts for the radical difference in our findings? There are three reasons. First, there was actually another president in the nineteenth century besides Andrew Johnson who made speaking tours in which he made speeches about policy matters—William McKinley. From 1898 to 1901, McKinley made scores of speeches on several tours around the country about such issues as domestic economic policy, the Spanish-American War, and whether we should keep the Philippines territory that we had captured as a result of that war. In fact, McKinley was assassinated in 1901 in Buffalo after he had made a speech before fifty thousand people about trade policy. Somehow, the very modern-looking efforts of President McKinley at going public were overlooked in The Rhetorical Presidency. A second reason for the discrepancy in our findings is that I count Abraham Lincoln as a president who engaged in the practice of going public, albeit very carefully and strategically. Lincoln made an average of over nineteen speeches a year, a number of which addressed national policy issues such

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as emancipation and reconstruction. He also publicized his policy positions in open letters to citizens and messages to Congress that were immediately published in newspapers across the country. It is true that Lincoln would sometimes decline to speak, even in situations when a speech seemed clearly appropriate. For example, on the day that the news of Lee’s surrender reached Washington, Lincoln was called out to the portico of the White House to address a large crowd that had gathered there to celebrate. Amazingly, he told the crowd he was not prepared to “say something” then! Significantly, however, he explained his refusal not by invoking a norm (which presumably the crowd—and Lincoln—should have been aware of ) but on the grounds of rhetorical prudence. Lincoln said: “Just now, I am not ready to say something that one in my position ought to say. Everything I say, you know, goes into print. If I make a mistake it doesn’t merely affect me, or you, but the country. I, therefore, ought at least try not to make mistakes.” What we see in Lincoln’s words is not a president who felt constitutionally constrained from going public, but one who just went public very carefully because he knew that whatever he said would reverberate across the nation. There is a third reason why I found so many more presidents going public in the nineteenth century. I employed a more comprehensive definition of going public. I defined going public as any identifiable means—and not just speechmaking—by which a president appeals to the public for support or understanding of his policies. This broader definition makes a crucial difference in the analysis. It turns out that another eight presidents in the nineteenth century (Jefferson, Jackson, Van Buren, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Pierce, and Buchanan) went public in a novel way. Rather than making speeches, these presidents used newspapers—newspapers that had been established and subsidized by their administrations to let the public know what their positions were on policy matters. These presidents met or corresponded with the handpicked editors of their newspapers regularly—sometimes daily—to ensure that what the editors wrote in the newspapers was what the presidents wanted said. These newspapers were used to publicize the president’s stance on issues. Politicians, government officials, and anyone else who wanted to know more about a president’s position could read these “presidential newspapers” to get that information. Perhaps most importantly, even though these presidential newspapers were published only in Washington, D.C., and had small circulations in the hundreds or thousands, they were actually a means by which a president’s

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message could be circulated throughout the country. That was because these Washington-based papers were sent free through the U.S. mail system to other administration-supported newspapers across the United States, and the editors of these friendly papers would then repeat the messages they found in the president’s paper. These papers really were “presidential newspapers.” They were conduits for the policy pronouncements of presidents, rather than just party newspapers, as is sometimes claimed. The evidence that these papers were used by presidents to communicate with the public on policy issues comes from four sources: (1) the judgments of historians; (2) statements of editors about their presidential connections; (3) remarks made by politicians of the time about these papers; and (4) what some presidents themselves said about their newspapers. Here is a sampling of the evidence: • Thomas Jefferson sponsored a newspaper, the National Intelligencer, that has been described by various historians as the “official gazette,” the “court paper,” and the “government organ” of his administration. In 1801, Vice President Aaron Burr said of the Intelligencer that the “explanations [in it] of the Measures of Government and of the Motives which produce them are, I believe, the result of information and advice from high Authority.” In 1807, a Boston opposition newspaper described the Intelligencer as the “Index of the Executive mind.” Jefferson saw the editor of the newspaper regularly, and there are records of him providing the editor with material to be published in the paper. • Andrew Jackson established the Washington Globe in 1830 to be, in his own words, the “organ to announce the policy and defend the Administration.” The editor of that paper, Francis P. Blair, met with Jackson daily as one of his Kitchen Cabinet members to discuss what Blair would write in that day’s edition of the Globe. Blair described himself in the Globe as the “editor of the official paper in Washington,” and a rival newspaper called him “an intimate at the palace” who “must be believed when professing to act by authority.” • The editor of John Tyler’s presidential newspaper, the Madisonian, described his paper as the “organ of the Administration,” and asserted that the “views and purposes of the Administration will . . . be made known through the columns of this paper.” The Madisonian’s chief rival, the Washington Globe, described the paper as “the journal which the Executive has constituted the exponent of its ‘views and purposes.’” Records survive of several instances in which Tyler gave his editor detailed instructions on what to write in the paper. • When Tyler’s opponents in Congress conspired to prevent Tyler from awarding government printing contracts to his administration’s newspaper, Tyler’s friend Henry A. Wise complained in a congressional hearing about the unfairness

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mel laracey of the action. It was, he said, an attempt to “strike at the Madisonian, and thus deprive the Executive of what had always been enjoyed under every previous Administration—the advantage of having a public press at the seat of Government to speak in his behalf, while other presses expressed the views of the opposition.” • James Polk kept a detailed diary during his presidency. This diary is filled with descriptions of the long meetings he had with the editor of his presidential newspaper, the Washington Union. The purpose of these editorial sessions was to discuss “the best ways to present policies and ideas to the public and to Congress.” Polk himself wrote numerous articles for the paper and used it to manipulate public opinion during the Mexican War. A prominent U.S. senator referred to the Union as “the oracle.” James Buchanan said that when Polk’s “organ . . . fell out of tune” the president would “set to adjusting its pipes.” • The editor of Zachary Taylor’s presidential newspaper, the Republic, described the paper as “The Presidential Organ.” • James Buchanan was the last president to have a presidential newspaper. Buchanan terminated his relationship with the newspaper and its editor after the editor began writing editorials that were contrary to Buchanan’s position on the right of southern states to secede. Buchanan wrote to the editor: “I have read with deep mortification your editorial this morning. . . . You have a perfect right to be in favor of secession, and for this I have no just reason to complain. The difficulty is that the Constitution is considered my organ, and its articles subject me to the charge of insincerity and double dealing.”

Clearly, this evidence demonstrates that many presidents in the nineteenth century were using their own newspapers to present their policy positions and arguments to the public. Nevertheless, proponents of the “unrhetorical nineteenth-century presidency” thesis barely mention, if at all, the existence of these presidential newspapers and definitely do not include them in their analyses of public communications by these presidents.4 As noted previously, two other presidents, Andrew Johnson and William McKinley, toured the country making policy speeches. Yet another president, Abraham Lincoln, artfully used a combination of speeches and public letters to present his views to the public, while at other times declining to speak for strategic reasons. So where does this leave the argument that there was a norm against going public, a norm that supposedly enjoined pre-twentieth-century presidents to direct their policy pronouncements to Congress, and not to the people? Certainly, the norm cannot have been felt universally. After all, one way or another, either through speechmaking, public letters, or presidential newspapers, eleven out of the twenty-two nineteenth-century presidents did

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make their policy positions known to the public directly, rather than only going through Congress. However, the other eleven did avoid going public in any way. What accounts for this divergence in approach to public communications among nineteenth-century presidents? There were two markedly different attitudes at the time of the Founding toward not only the ratification of the Constitution, but also toward what kind of government the United States should have, and the role presidents should play in it. These different attitudes can be traced back to the battle between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists over the ratification of the Constitution. One of the key elements of that battle was differing conceptions of a “republic,” or representative democracy. Even if one accepts that the Federalist Papers really do say that presidents should not go public—a claim that I dispute—the Federalist Papers are literally only half the story of constitutional attitudes in the nineteenth century. They are only half the story precisely because they were written by Federalists and do not reflect the thinking of the Anti-Federalists, who had a much different view of what kind of representative democracy the country should aim for under the new Constitution. As the work of Gordon Wood, Joyce Appleby, Saul Cornell, and others has shown, the conflicting attitudes toward the meaning of representative democracy that originated with the Federalists and Anti-Federalists continued to have a profound influence on the behavior of U.S. politicians throughout the nineteenth century. The Federalist attitude toward representation was perhaps most famously outlined by James Madison in Federalist Number 10. As Madison and others put it, the only way to make democracy safe for America was to filter it heavily via indirect elections and multiple institutions, with Congress at the center of the policymaking process. Politicians—and presidents—who followed this political philosophy would naturally have seen direct appeals to the public on policy matters as unseemly and constitutionally improper. The Anti-Federalist attitude toward representation was quite different. It favored the most direct, unfiltered kind of representation possible. In the AntiFederalist vision, representatives should reflect the views of their constituents “like the reflected light of the moon,” as one Anti-Federalist put it.5 For Anti-Federalists, representatives clearly were to be instructed delegates rather than deliberative trustees. This means that, while Federalists envisioned deliberation occurring in Congress, Anti-Federalists saw it occurring not in the nation’s capital but rather back home in the communities and states represented by legislators.

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The logical conclusion of this conception of a democratic government was that representatives were useful only as conduits for the expressed will of their constituents. In other words, they were not to think for themselves. Representatives who did not automatically seek to carry out the will of their constituents in Congress could actually be viewed as obstacles to be overcome, rather than as officials to be reasoned with or deferred to. From this viewpoint, it was just a short move for those inspired by the Anti-Federalist vision of a representative democracy to envision the popularly elected president of the United States as someone who might be able to divine and carry out the national will of the people more effectively than Congress could itself. Presidents would then be viewed as at least coequals with, if not superior to, Congress in the policymaking process. Presidents who adopted this conception of their office of course would have regarded their public involvement in the policymaking process as perfectly appropriate. This competing conception of the presidency validated going public even in the nineteenth century. The existence of two—not one—interpretations of the role of the president underlay presidential politics in the nineteenth century. As John Gerring has shown in Party Ideologies in America, his study of national party rhetoric in presidential campaigns, these attitudes were a part of the orthodoxies of the Republican and Democratic parties throughout the nineteenth century. In Gerring’s words, one side recoiled in horror at the “specter of a radical, plebiscitarian executive, on the model of ‘King Andrew’ Jackson, [working] in tandem with a directly elected, nondeliberative House of Representatives.”6 The other side welcomed the idea. As Stephen E. Lucas and others have noted, this division translated into radically different conceptions of appropriate presidential rhetoric and behavior. One side wanted the president to be a patriot-leader who had a “disinterested commitment to the national welfare” and who would always act and speak with dignity and deference to the legislature.7 The other side disdained this “gentlemanly mode” of public speech and action as nothing more than an elitist rejection of true democracy. They favored instead a direct “popular mode” of presidential behavior, in which presidents acted and spoke as if they had a direct relationship with the people.8 These competing partisan-based attitudes toward representative democracy and the role that presidents should play in it are key to understanding why, while many presidents in the nineteenth century avoided going public, an equal number plunged right into the public arena. Most presidents of the Republican and Whig persuasion (eight out of eleven, counting John

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Quincy Adams as a Whig precursor) avoided going public in the nineteenth century, while most presidents of the Democratic persuasion (eight out of eleven, counting Tyler and Johnson as the Democrats they really were) did go public, one way or another. This fundamental division in attitudes toward our democracy, and toward the role of presidents in the policymaking process, also explains why so many presidents who did go public chose to do so through the voices of their newspaper editors rather than making speeches themselves. By using surrogates to convey their messages in this thinly disguised fashion, these presidents were able to have their cake and eat it too. They were able to present their positions and arguments to the American people, consistent with their view that this was a legitimate part of the job of being president, while doing it in a way that still paid lip service to the views of those other Americans who believed that presidents should not be meddling in the public policy process. There were also some practical considerations for using presidential newspapers. Travel for speechmaking was very difficult for most of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, as Andrew Johnson’s experience showed, presidents could not necessarily control how their speeches would be reported in the generally partisan newspapers of the time. And by using editorial front men, presidents could always disavow a message that came out wrong or had an unfavorable effect, just as presidents today disavow such statements made by others in their administration. Of course, the suggestion that many presidents may have hid behind editorial mouthpieces to avoid antagonizing those who thought they should not be speaking about policy matters will surely be turned around and cited as proof of the existence of a norm against going public. However, just because these presidents may have sought ways to communicate with the public while not antagonizing those who opposed such communications does not mean the presidents themselves believed in the norm. These presidents, after all, did try to communicate with the public on policy matters, which is precisely what the norm is supposed to have prevented all nineteenthcentury presidents (except Andrew Johnson) from doing. As someone once said, “Actions speak louder than words.” And what sort of a norm would this be, anyway? How meaningful in terms of constitutional theory is it to say that in the nineteenth century there was a norm against presidents going public, but then also to have to acknowledge that a large number of presidents did indeed communicate with the public on policy matters, either directly or by using editorial surrogates

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who everyone knew were speaking—or were supposed to be speaking—for the president? Such a norm, ignored or evaded by fully half the presidents in the nineteenth century, seems not very profound. It certainly is not sufficient grounds for making sweeping generalizations about appropriate public rhetoric and the place of the president in the “original” constitutional order. The division in attitudes toward the role of the president in the constitutional order that existed in the nineteenth century also provides a more accurate understanding of the wording of one of the articles of impeachment against Andrew Johnson. Article 10 alleged that Johnson had made “with a loud voice certain intemperate, inflammatory, and scandalous harangues” and “loud threats and bitter menaces” against Congress. For Tulis, the fact that Johnson was “censured . . . by congressmen” in this way is powerful evidence of the existence of a norm against presidents going public.9 Placed in its true partisan perspective, however, the story of Article 10 is not nearly so compelling. Article 10 was included in the charges against Johnson at the instigation of Benjamin Butler, one of the most radical of the Radical Republicans and a man who had an extraordinarily narrow view of the role of presidents in the national government. Furthermore, only Republicans voted for this article in the House, and it never came up for a vote in the Senate impeachment trial. Since only Republicans voted for the article in the House, how can this article be evidence of a universally felt norm that speechmaking by presidents on policy matters was wrong under the Constitution? At most, the article is evidence of a very partisan-based view on this issue. Eventually, the institutional logic of the office of the presidency led to the triumph of the view that direct presidential communications to the public on policy matters are an essential aspect of the office. Today, everyone— Republicans and Democrats alike—wants a “strong,” communicative president who takes the public lead on policy matters. There were several factors that clearly contributed to this development. The first was the democratic movement that began in the early 1820s. This movement turned the presidency into the only (with the vice presidency) popularly elected national office. The second legitimizing factor was the explosion of mass communications that started in the nineteenth century with newspapers, steamboats, trains, and the telegraph. It continued in the twentieth century with radio and television. A third factor was the increasing inclination of presidents to use their veto power as a policy tool. This use of the veto encouraged presidents to go

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public in an effort to persuade constituents to pressure their representatives to follow the president’s lead. A fourth, noninstitutional factor was Woodrow Wilson’s brilliant exposition of the activist, popularly based conception of the presidency in his 1908 book, Constitutional Government. The cumulative effect of all these factors helped bring about what we see today: a presidency where going public is considered an inherent part of the job. What are the implications of my findings for the modern presidency? Certainly, one hopes this work will serve to free the presidential practice of going public from the charge that it is somehow constitutionally illegitimate. If the practice has been followed off and on by presidents from virtually the beginning of our republic, then it seems harder to prove—as has been asserted—that the practice is a deviation from the “original understanding” of the roles of Congress and the president in the national policymaking process. Nor can it so easily be argued—as has also been asserted—that the practice of going public is an unwelcome modern interference with the work of Congress and the roles that bargaining and deliberation were originally intended to play in the legislative process. Going public is no more harmful to the legislative bargaining process than it is in labor contract bargaining between unions and management. When they are negotiating a new contract, both sides often talk stridently in public, yet still keep on negotiating in private. There is nothing wrong, constitutionally, strategically, or institutionally, with going public. The practice, with all its rhetorical and technological flourishes, is really just the modern manifestation of a venerable American political concept: talking—and listening—to the people. The rhetorical efforts of many earlier presidents have simply been underestimated, and thus underappreciated, by some scholars. What is perhaps most interesting about the story of going public is how the idea that presidents should go public won out so thoroughly over the idea that presidents should not. Both ideas had an equal number of adherents among presidents in the nineteenth century, yet by the mid-twentieth century only one of the ideas had any adherents left. How did this happen? The story of the evolution of going public involves a process of constitutional development by mostly nonjudicial actors in the twentieth century that still remains to be explored.

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notes 1. The book elaborated upon the arguments first presented by Tulis and coauthors James W. Ceaser, Glen E. Thurow, and Joseph M. Bessette in “The Rise of the Rhetorical Presidency,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 11, no. 2 (Spring 1981): 158–71. 2. Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents (New York: Free Press, 1990), 11. 3. Philip Abbott, “Do Presidents Talk Too Much? The Rhetorical Presidency and Its Alternative,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 18 (1988): 353. 4. Tulis focuses only on speeches (formal and “informal”), presidential messages to Congress, and presidential proclamations. He does note that some of Thomas Jefferson’s “private communications were leaked to the press,” that James Madison “did anonymously pen several ‘stern anti-French editorials for the National Intelligencer,’” and that Andrew Jackson’s reputation as a popular leader derives in part from his “informal but effective support of the administrative information organ—a newspaper dedicated to publishing the president’s policy positions” (70–74). He says nothing further about these forms of presidential communication. Kernell does not even mention Andrew Jackson in his survey of the history of the practice of going public. See Samuel Kernell, Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential Leadership, 3rd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1997). 5. Samuel Chase, quoted in Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 371. 6. John Gerring, Party Ideologies in America: 1828–1996 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 92. 7. Ralph Ketcham, Presidents above Party: The First American Presidency, 1789–1829 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 89; Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1992) 44–54; Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 103–109. 8. Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 70; Stephen E. Lucas, Portraits of Rebellion: Rhetoric and Rebellion in Phildelphia, 1765–76 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976), 254–62. 9. Tulis, Rhetorical Presidency, 88.

On the Forms of Rhetorical Leadership jeffrey k. tulis



Mel Laracey’s chapter, reflecting a summary of his recent book, Presidents and the People: The Partisan Story of Going Public, deserves our attention and compels me to revisit some familiar territory.1 Presidents and the People is a well-written, thorough, and hard-hitting critique of several contemporary studies of presidential leadership. It reads like a legal brief, mustering evidence at every turn to support the proposition that there is no significant difference between nineteenth- and twentiethcentury presidential leadership while giving little credence to evidence to the contrary. Presidents were “popular leaders” from the beginning of the republic, according to Laracey, and although some nineteenth-century presidents were less rhetorically engaged than others, this more subdued political style reflected the views of a political party rather than an adherence to an overarching constitutional norm. Indeed, Laracey seeks to replace the distinction or contrast between “constitutional” and “popular” leadership by arguing that both styles are “Constitutional”—one extending the Federalist tradition and the other advancing the Anti-Federalist project. Laracey’s own effort continues a partisan project to the extent that he takes the side of the AntiFederalists in his historical story and thereby seeks to enhance the legitimacy of presidential appeals to the people in our time.

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For me, the most striking fact about Presidents and the People is the extent to which it actually confirms the propositions that it attempts to challenge. Although presidents in the nineteenth century gave significantly fewer popular speeches than presidents in the twentieth century, they did utter well over one thousand speeches. Since my own account of these rhetorical efforts relied heavily on biographies and other secondary sources, I thought it possible that I missed some speeches and therefore misclassified some of the nineteenth-century presidents when I described them as avoiding policy on the stump. Perhaps Laracey’s second look, an examination of more of the primary materials and additional secondary sources, would show that many presidents engaged in some exercises of popular leadership. Not so. Laracey rediscovered essentially the same picture that I described in The Rhetorical Presidency. Virtually all presidents in the nineteenth century avoided giving speeches directly to the people on matters of public policy or pending legislation, according to Laracey’s own findings. The only exceptions to this pattern were Andrew Johnson, whom I discuss as an exception that “proves the rule” since he was politically punished for such a speech, and William McKinley, who served at the end of the century.2 Laracey’s account of McKinley is a very useful corrective to mine. His instructive reading caused me to revisit the paragraph on that subject in The Rhetorical Presidency, where I claim that McKinley did not even allude to major issues of public policy. I was simply wrong.3 McKinley made a number of speeches on pending matters of legislation, including his last speech the day before he was assassinated in which he lent support to reciprocal-tariff treaties that were being held up in the Senate. Many other scholars have also overlooked McKinley’s popular rhetoric, perhaps because his policy references, which were so clear to his audiences, seem muted to our ears.4 In his last speech, for example, McKinley argues for the expansion of trade but does not refer explicitly to the fact that a treaty on that issue was pending business in the Senate, as Woodrow Wilson later did with the Treaty of Versailles. McKinley’s political practices do indeed complicate my account of the turnof-the-century constitutional development.5 This is a constructive criticism, but the larger story of the nineteenth century in Presidents and the People is a picture of a constitutional order in which policy rhetoric by presidents was written and addressed to Congress rather than spoken and performed for a popular audience, just as I had maintained in The Rhetorical Presidency. What, then, prompts Laracey’s insistence that there was no important transformation of the U.S. constitutional order at the end of the nineteenth century? Why does Laracey think that popular leadership has always been a

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legitimate component of the presidency? The intellectual burden of Laracey’s book is carried by the fact that in the nineteenth century partisan newspapers were often used to advance presidential policy agendas. While almost no presidents gave policy speeches, many, about 40 percent of them, used partisan newspapers. This is not news. All students of presidential leadership knew this, and I mention this practice in The Rhetorical Presidency.6 What is new is the meaning that Laracey attaches to this well-known fact. Although presidents did not sign or endorse messages printed on their behalf, and although they troubled to distance themselves from their partisan organs, Laracey believes their leadership was no different than that of modern presidents who “go public” and assume personal responsibility for their words. My difference with Laracey regarding the meaning of nineteenth-century presidential leadership comes down to this: like the social theorist Tocqueville, I attach tremendous significance to the importance of forms and formalities in political life, while, like many social scientists of the Michigan behavioral tradition, Laracey attaches little significance to the form in which leadership is expressed.7 Students of rhetoric will have an immediate sense of what I mean by the significance of form because the notion of genre has been so central to their discipline. The allegedly “same” message expressed as a metered poem has a quite different meaning when expressed as free verse, or when expressed as a piece of narrative fiction, or when expressed as a legal brief. The significance of form may be neglected by Laracey, but it was well understood by presidents and their publics in the nineteenth century. That is why presidents were punished for deviating from established forms and rewarded for adhering to them. In The Rhetorical Presidency, I try to describe how written expression, principally addressed to Congress but secondarily addressed to the people at large, was thought to enhance the status of the president as a constitutional officer. Conversely, direct oral performances before the people, except on extraordinary occasions, was thought to undermine the status of the president as a constitutional officer. Against this picture, Laracey describes our nineteenth-century presidents as unconcerned with “norms” but very concerned with tactical and strategic issues of partisanship. They avoided direct popular appeals because it might cost them politically and turned to the partisan press because it could help them politically. Laracey fails to see how this strategic calculus is nested within a particular constitutional order. Twentieth-century presidents, operating in altered constitutional circumstances, have a very different strategic calculus than their counterparts in the nineteenth century. Political

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opportunities and political pitfalls are not natural features common to all social circumstances but are themselves the by-products of larger constitutional configurations. The Rhetorical Presidency is an account of the development and transformation of that constitutional order and of the dilemmas that attend contemporary politics due to the current “shape” of the U.S. Constitution. After arguing that no overarching constitutional norms framed presidential politics in the nineteenth century, Laracey shifts ground and makes a case for two sets of norms, one deriving from the Federalists and the other from the Anti-Federalists. Those presidents who eschewed popular leadership, whether through direct speech or through their affiliated partisan newspapers, are described as enacting a Federalist understanding of leadership. But, a like number of presidents who engaged in active attempts to shape public opinion either through speechmaking or through the partisan press are seen to represent the Anti-Federalist understanding of the Constitution. Since a coherent set of constitutional norms did superintend the presidency throughout the nineteenth century, the case for a bifurcated set of norms is unnecessary, in my view. Yet even on Laracey’s own account, his case for these two theoretical traditions is incoherent for at least two reasons. In Laracey’s view, the Federalists represent a case for a “weak” presidency deferential to the legislature, while the Anti-Federalists stand for a stronger, more democratic plebiscitary presidency that leads a national legislative agenda. Yet the leading Federalist thinkers on executive power, such as Alexander Hamilton, were criticized by the Anti-Federalists as favoring a strong presidency insufficiently deferential to the legislature. And the best known proponent of the president as popular leader at the Founding was James Wilson, a Federalist. Wilson lost on that issue because both fellow Federalists and Anti-Federalists disagreed with him.8 And there is no Anti-Federalist on record supporting the idea of the president as plebiscitary leader at the head of a strong national government. Still more striking is the misuse of Federalist and Anti-Federalists as contending interpreters of a working Constitution when their dispute was over the desirability of adopting the Constitution in the first place. These political opponents had serious and strong disagreements over the merit of adopting the Constitution, but they were often in complete agreement on the logic of the Constitution’s functioning. Thus, both understood that the Constitution represented a fundamental change from the Articles of Confederation, both understood that the new regime would institutionalize interest and rely less on virtue than had previous republics, both understood that the power of the

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states would be diminished and that of the central government enhanced, both understood that the Constitution’s president would be relatively stronger than the executives of the existing state governments. The Federalists applauded this design and these expectations and the Anti-Federalists disapproved of them, but they did not disagree on the Constitution’s fundamental logic. Theory functions as an ornament in Presidents and the People. It is invoked, not advanced. Theory’s role seems to be to give a kind of cachet to Laracey’s effort to enhance the legitimacy of popular leadership in our time. Now, it is flattering to think that The Rhetorical Presidency and other writings by colleagues who make similar arguments have so altered the political landscape that presidents and their publics no longer measure presidential success by the standards of popular rhetoric. But what evidence suggests that presidents today are hesitant to go public or that the public no longer demands to hear their presidents speak to them directly? In the end, Presidents and the People offers the status quo as a partisan solution to a nonexistent political problem. I did not write The Rhetorical Presidency to make the case for a return to nineteenth-century presidential practices. Rather, I sought to understand the nature and sources of dilemmas that attend presidential governance in our time. I located these dilemmas, these problems, in a constitutional order composed of elements in tension. Where Laracey sees partisan antinomies, I see constitutional ambivalences and layers. Where Laracey sees popular leadership as either good or bad, I try to comprehend how it is both. Where Laracey sees the need for a stark choice between partisan alternatives, I see a need to understand the limits, dilemmas, and possibilities of a complex constitutional order.

notes 1. Mel Laracey, Presidents and the People: The Partisan Story of Going Public (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002). 2. Laracey also takes issue with my understanding of Lincoln’s reluctance to speak about policy. Because the public clamored for such speech, Laracey wonders how a public “norm” could account for Lincoln’s reticence. My central contention about Lincoln was not that Lincoln’s style of leadership illustrated deference to the preexisting norm, but rather that Lincoln’s statesmanship included thinking through, articulating, and constitutionalizing the norm. Lincoln is interesting precisely because he explains and defends an understanding of his office and thereby deepens the nineteenth-century constitutional order.

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3. Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 87. 4. See Louis L. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1980), 137. 5. “To the extent that McKinley spoke more frequently and spoke directly to public audiences on policy matters . . . McKinley was taking only small, hesitant steps away from a body of norms and expectations that continued to govern presidential behavior at the turn of the century.” Gerald Gamm and Renee M. Smith, “Presidents, Parties, and the Public: Evolving Patterns of Interaction, 1877–1929,” in Speaking to the People: The Rhetorical Presidency in Historical Perspective, ed. Richard J. Ellis (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 87–111. That McKinley’s rhetorical practices resembled the norms of the nineteenth century more than those of the twentieth is also confirmed by the account of his oratory in the hagiographic biography written by Halsted shortly after McKinley’s assassination. Mural Halsted, Illustrious Life of William McKinley: Our Martyred President (Halstead, 1901), chapter XIV, “President McKinley as An Orator.” See also Jeffrey K. Tulis, “The Rhetorical Presidency in Retrospect,” Critical Review 19 (Fall 2007): 2, 3. 6. Tulis, Rhetorical Presidency, 70–75. 7. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume II, Part IV, chap. 7. Much of what I know about Tocqueville on forms, and on the political significance of formality, I learned from Harvey C. Mansfield, America’s Constitutional Soul (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). 8. For a superb account of James Wilson’s understanding of presidential leadership and one that denies that Wilson “lost” see David Nichols, “A Marriage Made in Philadelphia: The Constitution and the Rhetorical Presidency,” in Speaking to the People, ed. Richard J. Ellis. Nichols has made the most powerful case that I have read for the Founding and nineteenthcentury origins of the rhetorical presidency in The Myth of the Modern Presidency (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1994).



Present at the Founding: The Rhetorical Presidency in Historical Perspective stephen e. lucas



Few ideas have had more impact in presidential studies during the past twenty years than Jeffrey Tulis’s concept of the rhetorical presidency. Indeed, the phrase “rhetorical presidency” has become an integral part of the vocabulary of political scientists and rhetorical critics alike. It has also become highly controversial. Part of the controversy has revolved around the question of whether the emergence of the rhetorical presidency has been a salutary development. With a few notable exceptions, political scientists have tended to see the rhetorical presidency as an unfortunate departure from the conceptions of government held by the Founders when they created the Constitution. There is certainly ample room for debate on this question, but to some extent the discussion is purely academic. Regardless of whether one applauds or condemns the emergence of the rhetorical presidency, its presence is a fact of modern political life and not one that is likely to change. A second subject of controversy—one that has received less attention in the scholarly literature up to this point—concerns the historical development of the rhetorical presidency. According to Tulis, the rhetorical presidency is a twentieth-century phenomenon that began to emerge under Theodore Roosevelt, crystallized during the administration of Woodrow Wilson, and was institutionalized by Franklin D. Roosevelt.1 In contrast, Mel Laracey

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argues that the practice of “going public” is hardly unique to twentiethcentury presidents. Whereas Tulis identified only one nineteenth-century president—Andrew Johnson—who openly took to the hustings in a fashion that would later become commonplace, Laracey holds that eleven of the nation’s chief executives during the nineteenth century went public in the sense that they appealed directly to the people for support or understanding of their policies—three through speechmaking and eight through handpicked, subsidized newspapers that disseminated and defended administration policies. All told, Laracey says, half of the nation’s nineteenth-century presidents made “their policy positions known to the public directly, rather than going through Congress.”2 Laracey’s findings suggest a vastly different rhetorical world for nineteenth-century presidents than the world described by Tulis. But it is also a vastly different rhetorical world from that inhabited by twentieth-century presidents. Tulis may be incorrect about the rhetorical practices of 50 percent of the country’s nineteenth-century presidents, but according to Laracey’s analysis, he is correct about the other 50 percent. To some extent, the issue is akin to the age-old conundrum of whether the glass is half empty or half full. Do we say that only half of the nineteenth-century presidents engaged in going public, or do we say that fully half of them did so? However one answers this question, the figures tell only part of the story. What I find telling in Laracey’s analysis is not just the number of nineteenthcentury presidents who went public, but the manner in which they did so. Of the eleven he identifies, eight (73 percent) went public surreptitiously through the surrogate medium of the press, which, in Laracey’s words, allowed them to “present their positions and arguments to the American people in a way that still insulated them from any claim that they should not be meddling in the public policy process.” Rhetorical as these eleven nineteenth-century presidents may have been, they were hardly rhetorical in the same manner as their twentieth-century counterparts. Even though some early twentiethcentury presidents such as Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge were not fully comfortable with the activist rhetorical role assumed by the likes of Wilson and FDR, they certainly could have assumed such a role, had they been so inclined, without arousing concern over whether they were exceeding the constitutional bounds of their office. By the 1920s, there was no longer any need to maintain the fiction that the role of the president was merely to execute the laws of the land rather than to play an active role in creating those laws and securing public backing for them. The decline of this fiction marked a profound change in U.S. politics, a change that simultaneously

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reflected and made possible the new patterns of presidential communication that came to prevail during the twentieth century. In a sense, then, Tulis and Laracey are both correct. Presidents were more active rhetorically during the nineteenth century than Tulis argues in The Rhetorical Presidency. But they were nowhere nearly as active—or as open about their activism—in the nineteenth century as they would become during the twentieth century. Is that openness a difference of kind or of degree? If it is a difference of kind, we are led to the conclusion that the rhetorical presidency is in fact a twentieth-century development. If, however, we are dealing with a difference of degree, we might be led to conclude that there are actually two rhetorical presidencies—the twentieth-century rhetorical presidency with which we are all familiar, and a nineteenth-century rhetorical presidency that was considerably different from its successor. Such a conclusion would acknowledge the broad gulf between the rhetorical practices of nineteenth- and twentieth-century presidents and, at the same time, take cognizance of the fact that a substantial number of nineteenth-century presidents did indeed use rhetorical means to present their policies to the public and to develop support for those policies. Although some scholars suggest that the ubiquitous presence of radio and television is the major difference between the nineteenth-century rhetorical presidency and the twentieth-century rhetorical presidency, I would contend that there is something more fundamental at work than the emergence of new communication media. What is present in the rhetoric of twentiethcentury presidents that is lacking in most nineteenth-century presidents is the performative dimension of public oral discourse. With the exception of their inaugural addresses, few nineteenth-century chief executives gave sustained public speeches in defense of their policies. As Laracey explains, most of their rhetorical work was done for them via the newspapers. In contrast, twentieth-century presidents engaged in so much public talk as to alarm more than a few scholars and other observers of the presidency. The amount and importance of presidential talk during the twentieth century is clearly revealed in the survey of communication scholars Martin Medhurst and I conducted in 1999 to determine the top one hundred American speeches of the twentieth century.3 Of the top one hundred speeches, thirty-five—more than one-third—were delivered by sitting presidents. Although there is no comparable survey for nineteenth-century public address, we can find a useful point of comparison by turning to Modern Eloquence, the fifteen-volume anthology of historical orations compiled by Joseph B. Reed and published over the years 1900–1903.4 Five of those volumes are devoted

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to political oratory. They contain eighty-two speeches by nineteenth-century American orators, but only five of those speeches were presented by sitting presidents. I strongly suspect that if Medhurst and I had conducted a survey regarding the top one hundred speeches of the nineteenth century, the total of presidential entries would not have been dramatically higher than that in Reed’s anthology, and it certainly would not have approached the number in the top one hundred speeches of the twentieth century. As numerous writers have noted, changes in transportation made it easier for twentieth-century presidents to address audiences in different parts of the country. But nineteenth-century presidents did not make speeches even when doing so would have involved no more than navigating the mile-long ride from the White House to Capitol Hill. In this they followed Thomas Jefferson, who in 1801 reversed the procedure of George Washington and John Adams by sending his annual message to Congress in written form, rather than going to Congress to present it in person. It was 112 years before another president, Woodrow Wilson, delivered his annual message as a speech, and it was not until Franklin Roosevelt took office that the practice became de rigueur. While Jefferson’s well-documented aversion to public speaking may have played a role in his decision, his stated rationale, consistent with good republican doctrine, was to avoid the trappings of monarchy that had attended the personal presentation of the president’s message under Washington and Adams. It is interesting to speculate what presidential rhetoric might have looked like during the nineteenth century if Jefferson had continued the practice of his predecessors by delivering his annual message in person. One of the great ironies in the history of the presidency is that its first occupant, who is seldom thought of as a man of words, was much closer rhetorically to the twentieth-century presidency than almost all the men who followed him in the intervening hundred years. As I have argued elsewhere, few chief executives have utilized the rhetorical resources of their office with more skill than George Washington.5 His tenure was marked by two towering rhetorical bookends—his first inaugural address, which initiated the custom of presidents opening their administrations with a public speech (unlike the annual message to Congress, which is mandated by the Constitution, there is no constitutional requirement for an inaugural address), and his Farewell Address, which remains one of the most celebrated presidential papers in American history and was recited in full on the floor of Congress every February 22 until the 1970s. In between these two archetypal works, Washington presented a second inaugural address, delivered eight annual messages to Congress, and

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took three regional tours of the United States, during which he gave dozens of ceremonial speeches in response to the addresses he received from citizens, municipalities, and organizations at every stop in his travels. Not only did Washington go public more than almost all of his nineteenth-century successors, he did so transparently, though the medium of public speech. Except for his Farewell Address, which was released via the newspapers (but openly and over his name), all his major presidential works were presented orally. As Washington understood, the presidency is inherently a rhetorical institution in which effective leadership depends not just upon the constitutional exercise of the duties of office but also upon the persuasive powers of the president vis-à-vis Congress, the people, foreign nations, the press, and even the remainder of the executive branch. He also understood, as astutely as any twentieth-century president, the rhetorical power of public speech in association with the enactment of the presidency. It was one thing, he knew, to receive his ideas in writing; it was quite another to receive them in person. A master of political ceremony, he staged the presentation of his speeches with great care. He also gave extraordinary attention to his self-presentation, cultivating a blend of regality and republicanism that, in combination with his magnetic physical presence and personal charisma, captivated those who saw and heard him. When Woodrow Wilson revived the custom of going to Congress to present the annual message in person, he reestablished the physical presence of the president as an imposing rhetorical force and brought back into play the performative component of presidential rhetoric that had been neglected through almost all of the nineteenth century. Although Washington did not stump for legislation as do modern presidents and was exceedingly respectful of the prerogatives of Congress, the extent and openness of his rhetorical activities as president pose a major problem for those scholars who argue that there existed a constitutional norm that prohibited pre-twentieth-century presidents from going public through the medium of public speech. According to Tulis, the “general constitutional theory” adhered to by the Founders prescribed that presidential recommendations on matters of policy be directed primarily to Congress and be presented in written form.6 As we have seen, however, Washington presented his annual messages to Congress orally, as did John Adams after him. Rather than seeing the penchant of nineteenth-century presidents to present their annual messages in writing as reflecting the constitutional theory of the Founders, it is more accurately seen as a departure from the precedent created by Washington and Adams.7

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When it comes to understanding what might be characterized as the original intent of the Founders with regard to presidential discourse, there is no better guide than Washington’s words and deeds during his administration. Not only was Washington president of the Constitutional Convention that crafted the document under which he was inaugurated as President of the United States, but his closest and most trusted advisor during the opening year of his administration was none other than James Madison, the “father of the Constitution.” The most telling of all Washington’s actions in judging his—and Madison’s—sense of the Constitution with regard to presidential rhetoric is that his first official act after taking the oath of office was to deliver a speech, his inaugural address, to the assembled houses of Congress. It is inconceivable that Washington would have presented such an address, which was drafted by Madison, if either he or Madison had believed the Constitution was intended to establish even an implicit norm prohibiting the president from making speeches on matters of national policy.8 It may be that nineteenth-century presidents, in Tulis’s words, “assumed that written messages were constitutionally prescribed,”9 but it is erroneous to claim that their assumption reflected the Founders’ view of the Constitution. This is an exceedingly important point. If presidential speechmaking on questions of policy is seen as a departure from the Founders’ constitutional theory and from the operations of the new government when they implemented it, then such speechmaking is inevitably tainted as being inconsistent with the deliberative model of government held by the Founders. If, on the other hand, presidential speechmaking is seen as consistent with the Founders’ constitutional theory and as existing in practice from the very beginning of the republic, then we are led to a very different view—a view in which the rhetorical role of the president in the policy-making process emerges not as a lamentable deviation from the system of government envisioned by the Founders but as an integral part of that system. In light of all this, we might even say there existed an eighteenth-century rhetorical presidency (albeit a very brief one) in addition to those of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the very least, we need to recognize that the notion of a monolithic rhetorical presidency does not capture the historical complexity of presidential rhetoric as it has developed across the years. It is in this spirit that I would like to end with one final observation—this one a caveat about the neat and tidy distinctions I have been drawing between the nineteenth- and twentieth-century rhetorical presidencies. As Laracey has noted, William McKinley, the last president of the nineteenth century, acted very much like a twentieth-century president in making several speaking

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tours around the United States, during which he addressed a variety of policy issues, foreign and domestic. On the other hand, there have been twentiethcentury presidents who would doubtless have been more comfortable with the rhetorical practices of the nineteenth century. Rather than a sharp rupture at the end of the nineteenth century, what occurred is more akin to a dissolve from one scene to another in a film. As the nineteenth-century rhetorical presidency faded out, the twentieth-century rhetorical presidency came into increasingly sharp focus. By thinking of the rhetorical presidency in these terms—and by keeping in mind as well the manner in which George Washington’s rhetoric in the earliest years of the republic prefigured that of the twentieth century—we can arrive at a more nuanced and richly textured view of what will doubtless remain an intensely debated subject among both political scientists and students of American public address.

notes 1. Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1987). Also see James Ceaser, Glen Thurow, Jeffrey Tulis, and Joseph M. Bessette, “The Rise of the Rhetorical Presidency,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 11 (1981): 158–71, which was the forerunner to Tulis’s book. 2. This and all other quotations by Professor Laracey come from his chapter in this book. Full documentation for his claims is provided in Mel Laracey, Presidents and the People: The Partisan Story of Going Public (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002). 3. See Stephen E. Lucas and Martin J. Medhurst, eds., Words of a Century: The Top 100 American Speeches, 1900–1999 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 4. Thomas B. Reed, ed., Modern Eloquence, 15 vols. (Philadelphia: J. D. Morris, 1900– 1903). 5. See Stephen E. Lucas, “George Washington and the Rhetoric of Presidential Leadership,” in The Presidency and Rhetorical Leadership, ed. Leroy G. Dorsey (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002), 42–72. 6. Tulis, Rhetorical Presidency, 46. 7. Laracey, too, mistakes the nature of Washington’s rhetorical activity, characterizing him as a president who did not go public. See Laracey, Presidents and the People, 139–46. 8. For fuller discussion, see Stephen E. Lucas, “Genre Criticism and Historical Context: The Case of George Washington’s First Inaugural Address,” Southern Speech Communication Journal 51 (1986): 354–70. 9. Tulis, Rhetorical Presidency, 46.



Part II

Nineteenth-Century Rhetorical Presidencies

Little Magic: Martin Van Buren and the Politics of Gender susan zaeske

The presidency of Martin Van Buren coincided with the growth of mass democracy and a concomitant increase in the power of public opinion. The burgeoning influence of the American public was cultivated by Martin Van Buren’s predecessor, Andrew Jackson, at a time when, according to Richard Hofstadter, the presidency had “declined from its heights under the leadership of Washington and Jefferson.”1 To be sure, Jackson’s popularity was based in no small part on his daunting ethos springing from his celebrated heroism during the Revolutionary War, his reputation as a fierce Indian fighter, and his heroism in the Battle of New Orleans. But Jackson’s appeal to the empowered American public resulted from more than his previous heroic acts. Indeed, Jackson cultivated the public by directly addressing the people in his annual messages, the “Nullification Proclamation,” and the “Protest to Congress.” Furthermore, Jackson expressed absolute confidence in the judgment of the people and emphasized that he, as president, was the only man chosen by all the people and thus was their “direct representative.” Consequently, Jackson’s ethos and professed trust in the will of the people combined to ennoble the presidency over the Congress as “the true organ of the nation’s will.”2 Although Jackson managed both to sponsor democratization and harness the growing power of the people to strengthen the office of

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the presidency, his hand-picked successor, Van Buren, was constantly forced to defend himself against negative public opinion and give ground to an increasingly powerful Congress. As Senator Thomas Hart Benton observed, in Van Buren’s ascendancy to the office of the presidency and Jackson’s departure, “the rising was eclipsed by the setting sun.”3 Besides the financial Panic of 1837, which generated criticism of the president from all quarters, there were two major issues upon which Van Buren was made to feel the pressure of concerted, ongoing campaigns to use the power of the people to alter the administration’s policy: slavery and Indian removal. A major part of the public that awakened and maintained sustained criticism of Van Buren was composed of women, who aroused opposition to Van Buren’s policies through the circulation of petitions, publication of appeals and books, and the delivery of speeches. The discourse produced by women employed a new political rhetoric of moral conscience, a rhetoric perpetuated by reformers and the growing Whig Party. Entrenched in the ideology and aging rhetoric of the Democratic Party, Van Buren was unable to respond effectively to the onslaught of negative public opinion arrayed against his administration. Indeed, by the late 1830s, reform and Whig women were so disenchanted with Van Buren and had gained so much power in the polity that in the election of 1840 they played a significant role in sweeping out of office the man whose dazzling political skills had earned him the moniker Little Magician.

the rising sun of mass democracy In The Rhetorical Presidency, Jeffrey Tulis argues that one of several forces that proscribed the president from making rhetorical appeals to the people was the Founders’ distrust of the capabilities of the mass of people, particularly fear that the masses would enable the rise of demagogues. “With respect to the president,” writes Tulis, “the founders wanted to elicit the ‘sense of the people,’ but they feared an inability to do so if the people acted in a ‘collective capacity.’”4 While that may have been the attitude of the Founders, an attitude that persisted in the early national period, by the era of Jackson and Van Buren the rise of mass democracy had dramatically changed the perceived and actual power of the polity. The expansion of adult white male suffrage (twenty-one of the twenty-four states had some form of it by 1826) led to the decline of aristocratic politics and the growth of mass electioneering. The gentlemanly statesman who could rightfully expect deference from his

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constituents gave way to the professional politician who actively appealed to the mass electorate. The growing power of that segment of the polity constituted of electors was accompanied by the growth of another segment of the polity, the democratic public. The democratic public, to borrow from Robert Asen and Daniel Brouwer’s definition of “bourgeois public,” is a collectivity composed not only of electors, but also of nonelectors, all of whom come together as private persons to debate the activities of the state and act in an advisory capacity. The growth of the democratic public during the early-nineteenth century was nurtured by advances in transportation and communication, which “helped shrink the nation and enlarge the political community.”5 Particularly important to the formation of a democratic public was the explosion in the publication of magazines and newspapers that occurred during these decades. Nationally circulated magazines appeared including Nile’s Weekly Register, founded in Baltimore in 1811, The North American Review, started in Boston in 1815, and Godey’s Lady’s Book, begun in 1830 and which attained the “extraordinary” circulation of 150,000 by the end of the decade. In the 1830s alone, the number of newspapers rose from 800 to 1,400, and sales tripled.6 Phenomenal expansion in transportation and mass communication, moreover, provided vehicles for creating publicity and, in turn, fueled the burgeoning power of public opinion. As Van Buren himself observed in his second annual message of December 3, 1838, “Each successive change made in our local institutions has contributed to extend the right of suffrage, has increased the direct influence of the mass of the community, given greater freedom to individual exertion, and restricted more and more the powers of Government.”7 Contributing to the new emphasis on participatory democracy and the growing importance of the public was the force of religious revivalism. The fiery sermons of revivalist ministers such as Charles Grandison Finney attracted hundreds of thousands of women and men to evangelical Protestantism, with its emphasis on the individual’s duty to cultivate personal morality and to safeguard the morality of the local and national communities. As Richard J. Carwardine has observed, “evangelicals offered an example of how the world might be changed through systematic public agitation,” and “provided professional organizers and models for mobilizing public opinion.”8 The spread of evangelicalism with its penchant for reform was not lost on Van Buren, who reported in his 1838 annual message: “All forms of religion have united for the first time to diffuse charity and piety,

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because for the first time in the history of nations all have been totally untrammeled and absolutely free.”9 The diffusion of charity, piety, and reform of which Van Buren spoke were considered the particular responsibilities of women, who were thought to be, and as a group in fact empirically were, more religious than men.10 Women’s capability to accomplish this work was enhanced significantly by the importance American political culture had come to place on public opinion, which women, denied the right to vote, could influence through means such as petitioning legislative bodies, boycotting products of objectionable institutions, and publishing protest literature. When during the late-1830s, major reform movements such as abolitionism, Indian rights, and temperance abandoned the strategy of moral suasion in favor of direct political action, “tens of thousands of women,” along with their male reform colleagues, “were caught up in the excitement of political campaigns.” These women, most of them animated by Christian benevolence related to their desire to solidify northern middle-class identity through the protection of Yankee values, supported the Whig Party.11 Though the direct political heir of the popular Jackson and a gifted politician himself, Van Buren failed to locate rhetorical strategies to exploit the growing power of the public, a public that included women. Indeed, even a cursory reading of his presidential messages reveals that throughout his term, Van Buren was constantly defending himself against negative publicity. Although a good portion of Van Buren’s unpopularity can be attributed to the fact that his tenure was plagued by the financial Panic of 1837, public dismay was heightened significantly by his handling of two other major issues of his term—abolitionism and Indian removal. The latter were distinctly rhetorical failures, for the issues of abolition and Indian policy required discursive representation of events that were removed from the daily lives of the vast majority of white Americans, especially those who lived in the North. Van Buren’s political ideology and resultant rhetoric failed to adapt to the changing “language, tone, and mood of politics” effected by the pervasive influence of evangelical reform and the spread of Whig ideology. The new political rhetoric, aimed at an audience who believed they possessed a moral duty to improve themselves and the national community, replaced entreaties to utility and expediency with uncompromising appeals to the moral character of citizens and their representatives.12 I will illustrate the clash between these two modes of political rhetoric and Van Buren’s inability to adjust to the changed rhetorical milieu by contrasting abolitionist and antiremoval discourses with President Van Buren’s rhetoric.

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the thunderbolt of abolitionism When the first session of the Twenty-fourth Congress convened on December 7, 1835, the House was barraged with 175 antislavery petitions, a total of 84—almost half—from women. The pleas were signed by 34,000 people, 15,000 of whom were women. One of those petitions came from the “ladies” of Glastenbury, New York, who emphasized that moral duty held them responsible to petition for abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. They were compelled to offer moral instruction to congressmen, the petition disclosed, because “the weak and innocent are denied the protection of law” and “all the sacred ties of domestic life are sundered for the gratification of avarice.” Knowing of these moral wrongs, the petitioners stated, “they cannot but regard it as their duty to supplicate for the oppressed those common rights of humanity.” Faced with more abolition memorials than ever before, Senator John C. Calhoun complained that the petitions came, not as in the past, “singly and far apart, from the quiet routine of the Society of Friends or the obscure vanity of some philanthropist club,” but “from soured and agitated communities.” His statement of dismay echoed the congressmen’s general disposition toward abolitionists and their petitions. Like many Americans, they were fuming over the “incendiary” literature abolitionists had been sending to the South through the federal mails. Antiabolitionist sentiment ran so deep that one northern representative, Samuel Beardsley, a Jacksonian Democrat, had been elected to Congress in large part because of his fight to keep antislavery societies from holding their state convention in Utica, New York. Animosity toward abolitionists was compounded by the fact that 1836 was an election year, and northern Democrats who hoped to elect New Yorker Martin Van Buren to the presidency wished to dodge discussion of slavery for fear such talk would upset southern party members.13 On December 16, 1835, a little more than a week into the congressional session, Representative John Fairfield of Maine presented a memorial signed by 172 females, praying for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia. He then moved that it be referred to the Committee on the District of Columbia, which had become the routine way to dispose of antislavery petitions with almost no chance of them reappearing for discussion. Before the motion could be debated, however, John Cramer, a Democrat from Van Buren’s home state of New York, moved that the women’s petition be laid on the table. Southern representatives such as John Patton of Virginia condemned the petitions as means for fomenting slave rebellions and demanded that the memorials be silenced without a hearing, while

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a few northerners, namely John Quincy Adams, defended the right of petition. Eventually the debate devolved to a political battle between Calhounities (states’ rights southern Democrats deeply opposed to Van Buren), who attempted to align Van Buren and northern Democrats with the abolitionists, and Adams’s northern Whigs and Anti-Masons, who accused southern Democrats of trammeling the civil rights of American citizens. Controversy over the petitions raged for months, pushing aside all other business of the House. The situation became so severe that on February 4, 1836, the House appointed a special committee headed by Representative Henry L. Pinckney of South Carolina, a Van Buren man, to study the petitions and report to the body as a whole.14 While the Pinckney committee deliberated over what to do with the antislavery petitions, Van Buren composed a campaign document articulating his position about the power of Congress to abolish slavery, which was issued in response to an inquiry made by a North Carolina public committee. In a statement published in major newspapers and circulated as a pamphlet, Vice President Van Buren pledged: “I must go into the presidential chair the inflexible and uncompromising opponent of any attempt on the part of congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, against the wishes of the slave holding states; and also with the determination equally decided to resist the slightest interference with the subject in the states where it exists.”15 The impact of Van Buren’s response reached further than the popular press, for the report of the Pinckney committee issued that May echoed the argument of the vice president’s campaign document, tacking on the “gag rule,” which immediately tabled antislavery petitions in the hope of quashing discussion of the divisive subject.16 The words of Van Buren’s response continued to echo after the presidential election was decided, for in his inaugural address of March 4, 1837, he repeated verbatim the passage quoted above, making him the first U.S. president to utter the word “slavery” in an inaugural address.17 Indeed, abolition agitation was the only issue Van Buren discussed at length in his inaugural, declaring that “the apprehensions of the timid and hopes of the wicked for the destruction of our Government are again destined to be disappointed.” Stating that he and the “masses of the people” remained devoted to “the bond of union and the principles it has made sacred,” he pledged to veto any bill authorizing abolition of slavery in the District or interfering with it in states where it then existed. He had settled on this opinion, Van Buren explained, “in accordance with the spirit that actuated the venerated fathers of the Republic,” because history had proved that spirit and those views to

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be “humane, patriotic, expedient, honorable, and just.” His commitment to perpetuating the ideologies and policies of the founding generation constituted a major theme of Van Buren’s inaugural, which ended with a sycophantic encomium to Jackson coupled with a premature, pathetic apologia: “In receiving from the people the sacred trust twice confided to my illustrious predecessor, and which he has discharged so faithfully and so well, I know that I can not expect to perform the arduous task with equal ability and success. . . . But united as I have been in his counsels . . . I may hope that somewhat of the same cheering approbation will be found to attend upon my path.”18 Less than a year after Van Buren gave his inaugural address, a member of the still-solidifying Whig Party delivered a speech entitled “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.” Interestingly, the two speeches shared a major thematic question—what is the best way to perpetuate the republic for future generations of Americans? Even more interestingly, the young Whig politician’s address employed at certain points exactly the same language as the inaugural. These similarities were hardly coincidental, for when he spoke to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, the aspiring Abraham Lincoln appropriated Van Buren’s own words to ridicule the Democratic president.19 In Lincoln’s “Lyceum Address” we can hear strains of the new rhetoric of moral conscience that animated Whigs and reformers during the mid-1830s, and which can be played against Van Buren’s inaugural to attune us to the discordant tones of the president’s rhetoric. At the beginning of his inaugural, Van Buren recognized “the earliest and firmest pillars of the Republic—those by whom our national independence was first declared, him who above all others contributed to establish it on the field of battle, and those who expanded intellect and patriotism, constructed, improved, and perfected the inestimable institutions under which we live.” Lincoln, too, recognized the Founders and, using the president’s very words, acknowledged the success of “the great experiment” in republican government. “The experiment is successful, and thousands have won their deathless names in making it so,” said Lincoln. But for Lincoln the future of the republic would be preserved not upon those pillars: “That our government should have been maintained in its original form, from its establishment until now, is not much to be wondered at. It had many props to support it through that period, which now are decayed and crumbled away.” Among the present people, though, were “men of ambition and talents” who would “naturally seek

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the gratification of their ruling passions.” The question is, said Lincoln, “Can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it cannot. . . . They were pillars of the temple of liberty; and now that they have crumbled away that temple must fall unless we, their descendants, supply their places with other pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason.”20 Lincoln, then, mocked Van Buren’s filiopieties as a foolish and outmoded notion of how to perpetuate the republic. The best hopes for the future, he insisted, resided not in heroes of the Revolutionary age nor hardened institutions, but in the present generation and its ability to mold established institutions. In this way Lincoln articulated fundamental principles of the emerging Whig Party, namely, as historian Major L. Wilson has aptly summarized, that “New values, or older values more widely disseminated, provided a standard with which to judge and improve upon existing arrangements no less than simply to secure them.” The Whig rhetoric of institutional change both reflected the influence of evangelical reformers on the party’s ideology and rendered the party attractive to the multitudes of reformers, certainly much more attractive than the Democratic Party.21 Van Buren’s sycophantic reliance on Jackson and other “illustrious predecessors” clashed with evangelical notions of individual moral responsibility to govern the self and reform the larger community. So while Van Buren pledged that he would be governed by the thoughts and actions of Jefferson and Jackson, evangelical reformers pledged to care nothing at all about the dictates of others—they took direction only from God. As Angelina Grimké declared in her Appeal to the Christian Women of the South, published four months before Van Buren’s election, “If a law commands me to sin I will break it; if it calls me to suffer, I will let it take its course unresistingly.”22 Characteristic of the rhetoric of radical reform, Grimké pledged that she would martyr herself for the moral cause of abolition rather than compromise with evil. Her oath contrasted starkly with that of Van Buren, who pledged that in dealing with the issue of slavery he would adhere “to the letter and spirit of the Constitution,” which he praised as a “sacred instrument” because “it was throughout a work of concession and compromise.” By contrast, William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist leader who printed Grimke’s Appeal, had stated publicly that he regarded the Constitution as “a pact with the devil,” “dripping . . . with human blood.”23

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the storm over indian removal As with the issue of abolition, with that of Indian removal Van Buren faced a large, concerted movement organized in his own section to arouse public opinion against the policies of his administration. Van Buren inherited a policy of aggressive relocation of Indian tribes and was responsible for executing the removals legislated during Jackson’s terms. The Cherokee removal issue stemmed from a compact Georgia signed with the federal government in 1802 guaranteeing that if the state gave up its western land claims, the government would remove the Cherokees from Georgia as soon as peaceably possible. By 1829, when the cotton plantation system had expanded westward and coveted even more land, Georgia demanded that the federal government live up to its promise. Presidents James Monroe and John Quincy Adams had recognized Cherokee rights and had hoped to persuade the Indians to move peaceably. But Jackson refused to acknowledge an independent Cherokee nation and, in his December 8, 1829, message to Congress ridiculed the Cherokees for having “pretensions” of erecting a sovereign state within Georgia. The president advised the Indians to emigrate beyond the Mississippi or to submit to the laws of Georgia. Jackson’s partisans in Congress responded to his message by introducing the Removal Bill, which authorized the president to set aside lands west of the Mississippi that could be exchanged with the Indians for their eastern lands.24 Well before passage of the Removal Bill, popular author and juvenile magazine editor Lydia Maria Child published literary works that voiced opposition to government policy toward the Cherokee. With short stories such as “The Lone Indian” (1827), “The Indian Wife” (1828), “The Church in the Wilderness” (1828), and “Chocoruas’s Curse” (1829), Child used the particularly feminine genre of protest fiction to gain access to public debate and to fill the nation’s literary annuals with stories that “echoed the controversy over the Indian’s destiny then reverberating in the halls of Congress.” These stories foretold the misfortune that would befall the nation—ravaged forests and blighted lives—if it persisted in the policy of dispossession of the Indian in the name of unbridled expansion. Child articulated her most sustained criticism of U.S. Indian policy in her 1829 book, The First Settlers of New England, which was at once a revisionist history of American colonization that condemned Spanish and British colonizers and a passionate protest against Jackson’s policy of Cherokee removal. Child argued that the Indians’ extinction was not a “law of nature,” but “the crooked and narrow-minded policy” Anglo-Americans had adopted toward the native inhabitants of the

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continent. Unless the United States brought its treatment of the Indians into conformity with the “religious and civil . . . principles which form the basis of our government,” she argued, the American republic will undergo “the calamitous reverses which have fallen on other nations, whose path to empire has been marked by the blood and ruining of their fellow-men.”25 Child’s protest literature and overtly political book contributed to women’s interest in the plight of the Cherokee. It appealed especially to women already sympathetic to the plight of the Cherokee due to their benevolent work on behalf of the Indians. Among this group were other popular female writers and reformers Catharine Beecher and Lydia Sigourney. During the summer of 1829, Beecher attended a speech delivered by Jeremiah Evarts, a missionary to the Indians, who was organizing a campaign to turn public opinion against Jackson’s policy of Cherokee removal. So moved was Beecher by Evart’s appeals that she called upon female friends to discuss the removal issue. Ultimately, they decided that the best course of action was to initiate a petition campaign. Beecher composed a circular addressed to the “Benevolent Ladies of the United States,” which was sent to those on the mailing lists of female benevolent organizations and reprinted in the reform press. Thanks in no small part to the “Ladies Circular,” hundreds of women from various regions signed petitions to Congress opposing removal of the Cherokee.26 Although thousands of men and women signed petitions to Congress opposing the Removal Bill, the political strength of Jackson and Democratic forces guided its passage through Congress. The Removal Bill set aside lands for the Cherokee, but did not actually require them to emigrate. Thus over the next five years, Jackson offered inducements to the Indians to make their way west, but the majority of the Cherokee nation refused to even consider removal. In March 1835, the exasperated Jackson bluntly addressed the Cherokee: “Listen to me . . . while I tell you that you cannot remain where you now are. Circumstances that cannot be controlled and which are beyond the reach of human laws render it impossible that you can flourish in the midst of a civilized community. You have but one remedy within your reach. And that is to remove to the west.” On December 29, 1835, a small splinter group of the Cherokee nation signed a treaty with the U.S. government by which they agreed to give up their lands east of the Mississippi for $5 million, assistance during emigration, and a year’s subsistence. Although the treaty was negotiated with only about one hundred Indians who possessed no true claim to be representatives of the Cherokee nation, it was considered legitimate by the government. Once again, despite public protest, on May 18, 1836, the Senate approved the treaty, but this time, by only a single vote.

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As the deadline for removal approached, the majority of Cherokee vociferously denied the validity of the treaty and refused to emigrate.27 Within the first month of occupying “the presidential seat,” Van Buren issued a proclamation declaring the Indian title to lands in Missouri extinguished and given over to that state.28 And in his first annual message, sent to Congress on December 5, 1837, Van Buren provided a lengthy defense of U.S. Indian policy. He began by disclaiming responsibility for the removal policy, again making clear that he was only following in the footsteps of his predecessors by emphasizing that it had been “commenced by Mr. Jefferson in 1804, [and] has been steadily persevered in by every succeeding President, and may be considered the settled policy of the country.” After providing a positive narrative of the civilizing of the Indians, he assured Congress that “arrangements for the emigration” of remaining Indians “will be completed the present year.” Unable to ignore what he called “the resistance which has been opposed to their removal,” he attributed this untoward obstacle to “persons to whom the trade with them and the acquisition of their annuities were important, and in some by the personal influence of interested chiefs.” In short, he represented opposition to the policy he intended to execute as the product of greedy and self-interested individuals rather than the true sentiments of the Cherokee nation. “These obstacles must be overcome,” he stated adamantly, “for the Government can not relinquish the execution of this policy without sacrificing important interests and abandoning tribes remaining east of the Mississippi to certain destruction.” Furthermore, he emphasized the expediency of carrying out the policy of removal, stating that “The interests of the United States would also be greatly promoted by freeing the relations between the General and State Governments from what has proved a most embarrassing incumbrance by a satisfactory adjustment of conflicting titles to lands caused by the occupation of the Indians, and by causing the resources of the whole country to be developed by the power of the State and General Governments and improved by the enterprise of a white population.”29 Although Van Buren assured that his policy served the desires and best interests of the Indians, within months of his message, in April 1838, a petition signed by 15,665 Cherokee opposing removal was submitted to Congress. The signers pledged never to give up the prospect of transmitting “to our sons the freedom we have derived from our fathers” unless it be by “an act of suicide.” White religious reformers bolstered the Cherokee plea by sending petitions of their own. The citizens of New Jersey, for example, stated in the passionate and uncompromising tones of radical reform that

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they felt “constrained, by the tenderest emotions of sympathy, to plead with you on their behalf, and to urge you, by every consideration of reason and religion, by your love of justice and mercy, and by the respect you owe to the dignity and character of our common country” to “reconsider this whole transaction.” The petition urged congressmen to strike from U.S. policy “every clause that may, in any wise, detract from the high profession we are making to the world, as a Christian people, acting under the benign influence of that holy Gospel whose first annunciation was heard in the angelic anthems of ‘peace on earth and good will towards men;’ and whose Divine Founder has left, for the government of all such nations, as well as individuals, as profess his name, the simple code of ‘Do unto others as ye would that they should do unto you.’”30 The petitions notwithstanding, in May 1838, which was the deadline for removal according to the treaty of 1836, Van Buren sent government troops to Cherokee land and charged General Winfield Scott with communicating that the U.S. president ordered them to move west or face removal by federal troops. After the army herded the Cherokee into stockades for embarkation and numerous Indians died from disease and malnutrition, Cherokee leaders acceded to government demands. In October, about seventeen thousand Cherokee began the march in quasi-military formation from Georgia to Oklahoma. At least four thousand Cherokee, or a fourth of the population that had been forced to march, died on what has come to be known as the Trail of Tears.31 Yet in his second annual message of December 3, 1838, Van Buren attempted to diffuse public outrage by grossly misrepresenting the event: “It affords me sincere pleasure to be able to apprize you of the entire removal of the Cherokee Nation of Indians to their new homes west of the Mississippi. The measures authorized by Congress at its last session, . . . have had the happiest effects. By an agreement concluded with them by the commanding general in that country, who has performed the duties assigned to him on the occasion with commendable energy and humanity, their removal has been principally under the conduct of their own chiefs, and they have emigrated without any apparent reluctance.”32 His happy report, however, was followed by an extended defense of removal, which he again characterized as the execution of long-standing U.S. policy rather than taking personal responsibility for his actions as president. Considering it an occasion of the success of government policy, he deemed the time proper to “exonerate the Government of the United States from the undeserved reproach which has been cast upon it.” Again responding directly to negative public opinion, he said that the government’s “dealings

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with Indian tribes . . . have been just and friendly throughout; its efforts for their civilization constant, and directed by the best feelings of humanity; its watchfulness in protecting them from individual frauds unremitting; its forbearance under the keenest provocations, the deepest injuries, and the most flagrant outrages may challenge at least a comparison with any nation, ancient or modern, in similar circumstances; and if in future times a powerful, civilized, and happy nation of Indians shall be found to exist within the limits of this northern continent it will be owing to the consummation of that policy which has been so unjustly assailed.”33 Van Buren made a special point of addressing the case of the Cherokee, which “has excited the greatest share of attention and sympathy,” listing the acres of land and amounts of money the government had granted in exchange for removal to the Indian Territory.34 But Van Buren’s appeals to consistency, utility, and expediency, and his attempts to label protests as “misrepresentations,” did little to quiet the outrage of reformers. His message was answered directly by another outpouring of petitions. The citizens of Pennsylvania stated that they were “penetrated with sentiments of disapprobation, and sorrow, when they hear[d] from distinguished politicians, a recital of injustice towards the aborigines, not with the intention of deprecating a continuance of that course of iniquity, but in order to make it an excuse for the perpetuation of another wrong, in which our character, as a nation and as republicans will be deeply, and more generally, implicated.”35 Reflecting almost two decades later on these events, Van Buren admitted that he was taken aback by the strength of antiremoval forces and declared that “a more persevering opposition to a public measure had scarcely ever been made.” And he predicted that “unlike histories of many great questions which agitate the public mind in their day [it] will in all probability endure . . . as long as the government itself, and will in time occupy the minds and feelings of our people.” To illustrate the “force” of the “excitement” over Indian removal, Van Buren offered an anecdote about traveling on the eve of the 1832 election through western New York, where, he said “the pro-Cherokee feeling had been lashed to a great height.” There he stayed at the home of his niece, “a lady of remarkable intelligence and strength of character, and deeply imbued with religious feeling.” When he retired to his room, she entered and after perfunctory greetings “proceeded to a spirited denunciation of our proceedings . . . toward the Cherokees.” Aware of her steadfast opinions on matters of conscience, a trait he ascribed to the “Hugenotish blood which flowed in her veins,” Van Buren made little answer to his niece’s charges. Upon leaving the room she retorted, “Uncle! I must say to you that it is my

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earnest wish that you may lose the election, as I believe that such a result ought to follow such acts!” The story of his pious niece underscored Van Buren’s point that “many of our religious societies were agitated and disturbed” by the proposed removal of the Cherokee” and “there was no doubt that not less than eight or ten thousand voters, in the state of New York alone, were controlled at the succeeding Presidential election in the bestowal of their suffrages by that single consideration.”36

the eclipse of martin van buren The voters in New York were not alone among U.S. citizens who would bring their reform commitments to bear on electoral politics. On the eve of the election of 1840, antislavery leader Henry B. Stanton estimated that “49/50ths” of abolitionists in Massachusetts were so hostile to Van Buren that they would “wade to their armpits in molten lava” to turn him out of office. During the campaign, Whigs exploited the Indian issue by reprinting an address to Quakers that condemned Van Buren’s treatment of the Seminole and Seneca as having displayed “criminality,” “treachery,” and “wickedness.” They also printed as a campaign tract their candidate William Henry Harrison’s 1838 Discourse on Aborigines in which he condemned Van Buren for introducing the practice of using Cuban bloodhounds to hunt Indians. By voting day, evangelicals had come to view Harrison as the best candidate for ending the mistreatment of Indians and for fostering the civilizing and Christianizing of these native peoples. For pious evangelicals, the election of 1840, Carwardine has observed, “had a profound religious significance” with Whig propagandists encouraging evangelicals to turn Harrison into “a spiritual and religious symbol,” thereby investing the campaign and election with a strong moral dimension.37 Thanks to the work of Robert Gray Gunderson, many scholars are familiar with the 1840 “Log Cabin Campaign,” during which Whigs co-opted Democratic popular rhetoric to depict their man Harrison as completely satisfied to live in a log cabin and to drink hard cider while portraying Van Buren as an effete incumbent luxuriating in the “presidential palace,” imbibing champagne. Typical of Whig propaganda was a biography of Van Buren penned by folk hero and Tennessee congressman Davy Crockett, who wrote that “Van Buren is as opposite to General Jackson as dung is to diamond. . . . He is laced up in corsets, such as women in town wear, and, if possible, tighter than the best of them. It would be difficult to say, from his personal appearance,

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whether he was a man or woman, but for his large red and gray whiskers.”38 Ironically, while the Whig propagandist Crockett denigrated Van Buren by associating him with stereotypical and negative feminine traits, women— especially reform women—were drawn to the Whig Party. For females politicized through their attachment to reform and Whig principles, the dough-faced, Indian-killing Van Buren held little magic, and disenchanted women played a significant role in sweeping the so-called Little Magician out of office. Recognizing in women a new source of energy in what had developed into a carnivalesque electoral environment, Whigs incorporated them into audiences of political rallies, hoping that as symbols of morality, women’s presence would associate candidates with virtue and testify to the party’s respectability. But Whig women were more than “conspicuous, but passive” audience members. They also produced needlepoint and other material objects that promoted Whig candidates, employed interpersonal influence to sway voters, conducted political meetings, wrote pamphlets, and gave speeches. So important was it to Whigs to gain women’s support for Harrison’s bid for the presidency that during his campaign tour through Virginia, party leader Senator Daniel Webster made a point of delivering a “special” address to the “ladies” of Richmond, Virginia.39 A remarkable 80 percent of eligible voters went to the polls in the election of 1840, which Van Buren lost by a fraction of the popular vote, but by a landslide of the votes in the Electoral College. The election would be called the “Revolution of 1840,” for it provided a clear marker of a significant change in U.S. party politics, namely the demise of the Democratic Party and undisputable rise of the Whigs amid a newly energized political society. With the Revolution of 1840 came a change in political rhetoric from the Democrats’ characteristically tempered appeals to consistency, utility, and expediency, to the Whigs’ passionate, uncompromising appeals to individual moral conscience. This brand of rhetoric, grounded as it was in the tenets of evangelical Protestantism, held particular sway for reform women, many of whom transferred their efforts to influence public opinion on behalf of reform movements into efforts to elect Whig candidates. Indeed, another facet of the Revolution of 1840 was the unmistakable presence of women in electoral politics. Although women could not culminate their varied forms of participation in the 1840 campaign by casting a ballot, their presence and power, nonetheless, was “inextricably woven into the fabric of the political culture that fashioned the electoral outcome of 1840.”40 What was true of the election of 1840 in particular, is true of U.S. political culture in general—as Joan Wallach Scott has put it, U.S. political history

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has “been enacted on the field of gender.”41 Given this observation, scholars of political and presidential rhetoric would do well to further investigate the role of the public—including its diverse constituents—in relation to the rhetorical presidency and the formulation of presidential rhetoric. For when we move away from exclusive focus on the institution of the presidency to exploring the effects of a diverse public on the power of the executive office, we are better able to understand the presidency and to recognize the significant role of other actors in the political system, not the least of which are women.

notes 1. Richard Hofstadter notes that in the era when Jackson rose to power, the presidency had “declined from its heights under the leadership of Washington and Jefferson, the contest for the presidential seat resolved into a scramble of local and sectional princelings for the position of heir apparent.” Richard Hofstadter, the The American Political Tradition and Men Who Made It (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), 49. 2. Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 74; Major L. Wilson, The Presidency of Martin Van Buren (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1984), 13; Hofstadter, American Political Tradition, 47. 3. Thomas Hart Benton quoted in Jeanne Boydston, Nick Cullather, Jan Ellen Lewis, Michael McGerr, and James Oakes, Making a Nation: The United States and Its People (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2002), 365. 4. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency, 34. 5. Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer, Counterpublics and the State (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), 4; Richard J. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 7. 6. Norman A. Graebner, Gilbert C. Fite, and Philip L. White, A History of the American People, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975), 275. The circulation figure for Godey’s Lady’s Book is from Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1975), 65. 7. Martin Van Buren, “Second Annual Message,” December 3, 1838, in A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, James D. Richardson, ed. (New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1897), IV, 1701. 8. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics, xvii. 9. Van Buren, “Second Annual Message,” December 3, 1838, in Richardson, ed., Messages and Papers of the Presidents, IV, 1701. 10. During the nineteenth century, there was a tendency to view religion as resting on the personal or domestic sphere, which was considered particularly feminine. Consequently the general belief was that religion existed outside the secular realm, which was considered particularly masculine. This dichotomy was reinforced by prescriptive literature beginning in the late eighteenth century which advised women to be devout and virtuous while men were excused from such standards due to the fact that their “passions” were constantly “subject to be heated by the ferment of business.” For example, in his Sermons to Young Women read widely in the colonies during the Revolutionary era, the Presbyterian preacher James

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Fordyce told women that “Nothing can be more plain, than that Providence has placed you most commonly on circumstances peculiarly advantageous for the exercises of devotion, and for the preservation of that virtue.” As for men, he said, their situation left them “open to a variety of temptations. . . . The bustle of life, in which they are generally engaged, leaves them often but little leisure for holy offices. Their passions are daily subject to be heated by the ferment of business; and how hard is it for them to avoid being importuned to excess.” “From such snares,” Fordyce told women, “your sex are happily exempted.” Statements that women should be more religious than men reflected the fact that as a group women were indeed more religious than men. Greater numbers of women belonged to and joined churches during most of the colonial period as well as dominating church membership in the early nineteenth century. Whatever its origins, belief in women’s natural inclination toward religion implied that piety was natural for women and somehow unnatural for men. For discussions of gender and religion during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, see Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller, Women and Religion in America: Volume 1: The Nineteenth Century (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981), ix; James Fordyce, Sermons to Young Women, two vols. in one, 3rd American edition from 12th London ed. (Philadelphia: M. Carey; New York: I. Riley, 1809), II, 5–6, in Ruether and Keller eds., Women in Religion in America, 13–14. Several hypotheses have been advanced to explain women’s predominance in religion in the United States during the antebellum period. These include economic concerns, preparation for marriage, and fear of death during childbirth. See, for instance, Nancy Cott, “Young Women in the Second Great Awakening,” Feminist Studies 3 (Fall 1975) and The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), Chapter 4; Barbara Welter, “The Feminization of American Religion, 1800–1860” in Barbara Welter, ed., Dimity Convictions (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976). 11. Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the 19th-Century United States (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990); Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics, 33. 12. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics, 35. 13. Petition of the Ladies of Glastenbury for Abolition of Slavery in the District of Columbia, 1836, HR24A-H1.3, National Archives Box 3 of Library of Congress Box 47, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; Petition of the Ladies of Marshfield for Abolition of Slavery in the District of Columbia, December 18, 1835 to June 6, 1836, HR24A-H1.3, National Archives, Washington, D.C. Calhoun quoted in Miller, Arguing About Slavery, 30; Miller, Arguing About Slavery, 111, 51. 14. Miller, Arguing About Slavery, 111, 51. For a sustained analysis of congressional debate over women’s antislavery petitions see Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women’s Political Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 15. Martin Van Buren quoted in William G. Shade, “‘The Most Delicate and Exciting Topics: Martin Van Buren, Slavery, and the Election of 1836,” Journal of the Early Republic 18 (1998): 463. 16. Shade, “Van Buren, Slavery, and the Election of 1836,” 459–84. 17. Major L. Wilson, “Lincoln and Van Buren in the Steps of the Fathers: Another Look at the Lyceum Address,” Civil War History 29 (1983): 206. 18. Martin Van Buren, “Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1837, in Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, IV, 1530–37. 19. Wilson offers a sustained analysis of Lincoln’s “Lyceum Address” as a response to Van Buren’s inaugural in “Lincoln and Van Buren.”

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20. Abraham Lincoln, “Lyceum Address,” Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1837, in The Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. John G. Nicolay and John Hay (Cumberland Gap, Tenn.: Lincoln Memorial University, 1894), I, 46. 21. Wilson, “Lincoln and Van Buren,” 208. 22. Angelina Grimké, An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836) in The Public Years of Sarah and Angelina Grimké: Selected Writings, 1835–1839, ed. Larry Ceplair (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 58–59. 23. Garrison quoted in Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 143, 313. Likewise, only seven months after Van Buren’s inauguration, Sarah Grimké advised female antislavery petitioners never to allow themselves to be “governed by the opinion of man.” “Tell him that you cannot obey him, rather than God, and that it is your intention to sign that petition,” she urged. This same rhetoric of individual moral duty requiring political action by individuals permeated the antislavery petitions signed by hundreds of thousands of women throughout New England, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. A petition from women in New York is representative of the rhetoric that those women sent to Congress from spring 1835 through the early spring of 1837. The New Yorkers stated that they petitioned not out of self-interest, but out of moral duty to the republic and to slaves of their sex. They feared that the country had been dishonored and would be punished by God. Furthermore, recognizing in every enslaved woman a sister, we “plead for her as we would plead for ourselves, our mothers, and our daughters. We plead for our suffering and abused sex.” Sarah Grimké, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes in Ceplair, Public Years, 262–63; Petition of 800 Ladies of New York, 1835. 24. Francis Paul Prucha, “Protest by Petition: Jeremiah Evarts and the Cherokee Indians,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 97 (1985): 43–46. 25. Carolyn L. Karcher, The First Woman of the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 102–4, 86–89. 26. John A. Andrew, From Revivals to Removal: Jeremiah Evarts, the Cherokee Nation, and the Search for the Soul of America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 210; Mary Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition: The Struggle against Indian Removal in the 1830s,” Journal of American History 86 (1999), 18, 24–25; Alisse Portnoy, Their Right to Speak: Women’s Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005); “Circular Addressed to the Benevolent Ladies of the United States,” Christian Advocate and Journal, Dec. 25, 1829, quoted in Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women,” 25–26. 27. Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), I, 233–38. 28. Van Buren, “Proclamation,” in Richardson, Messages and Papers, IV, 1538. 29. Van Buren, “First Annual Message,” December 5, 1837, in Richardson, Messages and Papers, IV, 1608, 1609. 30. Memorial of a number of citizens of New Jersey: praying Congress to reconsider the treaty made with the Cherokee Indians, at New Echota, in the year 1835. 25th Congress, 2nd Session, Senate, 1837–1838. 31. Prucha, Great Father, I, 240–41. 32. Van Buren, “Second Annual Message,” in Richardson, ed., Messages and Papers of the Presidents, IV, 1714–15. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Petition of the Citizens of Pennsylvania against removal of the Cherokee from the states of Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama, n.p., nd., 183?, State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

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36. Martin Van Buren, The Autobiography of Martin Van Buren, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick, 2 vols. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), II, 275–76, 293–94. 37. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics, 138, 63, 55. 38. Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 106–7. Crockett quoted in Robert Gray Gunderson, The Log-Cabin Campaign (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1957), 114. Gunderson notes that Crockett’s biography was written for the 1836 campaign, “but the misinformation he conveyed was apparently not well disseminated until 1840, when it was a decisive factor in the election.” 39. Gunderson, The Log-Cabin Campaign, 4, 7–8, 135–39; Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, 106–7; Roger A. Fischer, Tippecanoe and Trinkets Too: The Material Culture of American Presidential Campaigns, 1828–1984 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 29–48; Keith E. Melder, Hail to the Candidate: Presidential Campaigns From Banners to Broadcasts (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 75–90; Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “Whig Women, Politics, and Culture in the Campaign of 1840: Three Perspectives from Massachusetts,” Journal of the Early Republic 17 (1997): 277–315; Daniel Webster, “Remarks to the Ladies of Richmond,” in The Works of Daniel Webster, II, 105–8; Elizabeth R. Varon, We Mean to be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 71–72, 78–79. 40. Zboray and Zboray, “Whig Women,” 315. 41. Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 49.



John Tyler and the Rhetoric of the Accidental Presidency david zarefsky

Except perhaps in his Virginia birthplace and in the Texas city that bears his name, our tenth president, John Tyler, is largely forgotten. He is the afterthought in the 1840 campaign slogan, “Tippecanoe, and Tyler Too.” He is “His Accidency,” a man never meant to be president but who succeeded to the office upon the unfortunate death of William Henry Harrison one month after his inauguration. Not counting a brief booklet, two recently published studies are the first substantial biographies of Tyler in over forty years.1 His public statements over four years as president occupy little more than three hundred pages in Richardson’s Messages and Papers of the Presidents, and most of these are ritualized statements or transmittals of information requested by Congress. Conventional wisdom regards Tyler as “among the most inept politicians ever to occupy the White House . . . obstinate, sour, and snobbish as only a Virginia aristocrat could be.”2 But as one of John C. Calhoun’s biographers observed, this is a gross underestimation of a “brilliant Virginian” whose name in 1840 had “a charm for the Southern people.”3 And in a history of the politics of slavery, William J. Cooper concluded that Tyler “had more influence on southern politics than any other southern politician between Andrew Jackson and the demise of the second party system” because

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he “guaranteed the continued supremacy of the politics of slavery in the South.”4 That this result was an unintended byproduct of Tyler’s persuasive campaign for the annexation of Texas does not diminish its significance. Certainly Tyler came to the vice presidency with strong political credentials. Born in 1790, he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates in 1811 and to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1816. A severe gastrointestinal disorder led him to resign from the House in 1821 in order to recuperate. Two years later he returned to the Virginia legislature. In 1825 he was elected governor (a position his father also had held) and he was chosen a U.S. Senator in 1826. Originally a strong supporter of Andrew Jackson, he broke with “Old Hickory” over the withdrawal of government deposits from the Bank of the United States, an act Tyler regarded as unauthorized and unconstitutional.5 He was a strict constructionist and an ardent defender of states’ rights. In 1836, when the Whigs ran several candidates with different ideologies, Tyler won forty-seven electoral votes for vice president.6 He returned to the Virginia House of Delegates once again in 1838 and was elected speaker in 1839. He was a natural ticket-balancing candidate in 1840, a states’ rights Democrat-turned-Whig whose strict constructionist followers could add weight to the Whig faction that denounced executive tyranny over Congress, held Jacksonian politics responsible for the depression, and promoted the further development of industry and commerce. That this was a potentially unstable combination seemed not to trouble anyone. Whig leaders asked Tyler no questions about his beliefs; Harrison did not confide in him either. For his part Tyler made no suggestions for cabinet nominees.7 Nevertheless, when Harrison died after only one month in office, Whig leaders assumed that Tyler would carry his programs forward. The fact that Tyler moved in the opposite direction does not detract from the significance of his administration. He established the legitimacy of vice-presidential succession to the highest office, he advanced the diplomatic interest of the United States through a series of treaties and negotiations, and—most prominently—he brought about the annexation of Texas. Moreover, the first and third of these achievements can be explained in significant part by reference to rhetorical constructions. It is hard to imagine more adverse circumstances for Tyler’s accession. To begin with, his constitutional authority was unclear. Article II provides, “In case of the removal of the president from office, or of his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of said office, the same shall devolve on the vice-president.” But did “the same” refer to “said office” or only to “the powers and duties”? Was Tyler truly the president

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or only, as some thought, the vice president acting as president? Tyler, of course, believed the former, and he received support for that view from the secretary of state, Daniel Webster.8 To make the point, he took the presidential oath of office even though he thought it unnecessary since he was already covered by the oath he had taken as vice president. A second complication was that Tyler’s political principles differed from those of Harrison and of a majority of the Whigs. Many Whig leaders assumed he would follow in Harrison’s footsteps. Others might have chosen politics over principle, but not Tyler. On the same day he issued his inaugural address, he wrote to fellow Virginian William C. Rives, “In the administration of the govt. I shall act upon the principles which I have all along espoused and which you and myself have derived from the teachings of Jefferson and Madison and others of our distinguished countrymen.”9 Later in his administration, he wrote to another correspondent incredulously, “Did the federal portion of the Whig Party indulge a dream that when we went into union with them to produce a change in the administration, that thereby we had covenanted to lay at their feet our principles, our judgments, and all our thoughts and emotions.”10 To fully grasp the significance of Tyler’s determination, consider this thought experiment: Imagine the reaction of political leaders and of the country if Lyndon Johnson, upon becoming president in 1963, had not proclaimed, “Let us continue,” promising to carry out John F. Kennedy’s programs and reaching back to his own New Deal commitments, but instead had harked back to the views on states’ rights he had espoused in the late 1940s and early 1950s when he first was elected to the Senate. Further compounding these difficulties was the state of executivelegislative relations at the time of Harrison’s death. In his inaugural address, the hero of Tippecanoe had promised government by Congress. He would not interfere with their actions, he said; moreover, he would serve only one term.11 He had called Congress into special session to meet on June 1 to consider economic measures, perhaps including the charter of a new Bank of the United States. In the Senate sat Henry Clay, titular head of the Whig Party, who had every expectation of dominating policy during the Harrison administration. When the old general died, it was not unreasonable to expect that his successor would preside over a regency in which the real power would be wielded from the opposite end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Certainly Tyler recognized the difficulties of his situation. Writing to William Rives in April 1841, he not only expressed his own apprehension that he might not be up to the job, but added, “I am under Providence made the instrument of a new test which is for the first time to be applied to our

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institutions—The experiment is to be made at a moment when the country is agitated by conflicting views of public policy, and when the spirit of faction is most likely to exist.”12 How, then, did Tyler respond to the complexities of the situation? To begin with, he simply assumed the title and role of president. Those who addressed him as “acting president” or “president ad interim,” found that their messages were ignored; eventually, these usages disappeared. Tyler disregarded any doubt and enacted the role. Tyler hastily composed a message that was designated an inaugural address. In that message he defined Harrison’s death as a test for the nation, declared that the office had devolved to him, predicted opposition from what he defined as factions (reinstating the devil term from the Revolutionary War era) but confidently relied on the people’s judgment and on God. He also stressed the need to preserve a delicate balance of power within the government and pledged to remove officials who did not understand the need to separate the sword and the purse. He agreed that some change in fiscal policy was needed but offered no specific proposal. His basic foreign policy principle would be to offer justice to all and to seek it from all. He would consult other national leaders, “fathers of the old republican school,” for advice.13 The message was, if anything, passive, but it did mark a rite of passage, and it did enable Tyler to take up the symbolism of presidential leadership. Tyler went ahead with the special session of Congress called by President Harrison, and delivered a message on June 1, 1841. He paid tribute to his predecessor and urged Congress to work harder. He laid out an agenda of issues ranging from the tariff to naval defense, from territorial expansion to banking, but for the most part he did not offer specific proposals. He called the 1840 election a defeat for the sub-treasury system of Martin Van Buren but pointed out that “no other scheme of finance seemed to have been concurred in,” so he submitted the question to Congress. He would accept whatever policy Congress devised, so long as it was constitutional. And he reminded Congress that the states were the constituents, not the servants, of the federal government.14 Those who regarded Tyler’s message as weak and anticipated that Congress would dominate him, did not pay enough attention to the president’s insistence that actions must be constitutional—as determined, of course, by him, with his strict constructionist predispositions and his commitment to states’ rights. Under the leadership of Henry Clay, the special session passed a bill to recharter the Bank of the United States. Tyler vetoed it, and in his veto message he explained why. Having for twenty-five years consistently

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opposed the power to create a bank—opposition of which the country was aware when it elected him vice president—he could not now go along “without surrendering all claim to the respect of honorable men, all confidence on the part of the people, all self-respect, all regard for moral and religious obligations, without an observance of which no government can be prosperous and no people can be happy.”15 In a separate message to the House, he acknowledged that the veto should be used sparingly but insisted that when it was appropriate he had no alternative. The president “must either exert the negative power intrusted to him by the Constitution chiefly for its own preservation, protection, and defense or commit an act of moral turpitude.” To say that a president should sanction a bill just because a majority had passed it “is to abrogate the [veto] power altogether and to render its insertion in the Constitution a work of absolute supererogation.”16 In both these messages, Tyler proclaimed that his use of the veto was reluctant but necessary in order to preserve the Constitution and “to uphold the institutions of the country as they have come down to us from the hands of our godlike ancestors.”17 He positioned himself as the defender of the Constitution and the laws against those who would traduce them—traducers who, by and large, came from his own political party. The exercise of the veto and his defense of it became the means by which Tyler would assert independent leadership by the chief executive. He did so repeatedly. Vetoing a tariff bill in 1842, he sarcastically noted that “however sensible I may be of the embarrassments to which the Executive, in the absence of all aid from the superior wisdom of the Legislature, will be liable . . . I have not . . . been able to persuade myself that the exigency of the occasion is so great as to justify me in signing the bill in question with my present views of its character and effects.”18 He told the House of Representatives that the president was always responsible for exercising independent judgment regarding matters passed by Congress, especially when the subject was as important as the tariff.19 In 1844 he vetoed a rivers and harbors bill because the power over streams and watercourses within each state, not being otherwise enumerated in the Constitution, is reserved to each state.20 Tyler’s vigorous and persistent defense of the veto became the means by which he asserted presidential authority. The real issue in the Bank controversy, according to Robert Seager, was who would control the Whig Party. It was, he writes, “at bottom a personal and factional political battle in which Clay had the votes and Tyler the vetoes.”21 To be sure, his Whig antagonists reacted to the vetoes with vituperation. When Tyler vetoed a second bank bill, he was formally expelled from the party and the entire cabinet, except

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for Secretary of State Webster, resigned in protest.22 This was the first and only time that a president was, as Seager put it, “thrown bodily out of the political organization which had nominated and elected him.” His expulsion prompted Whig publicists to berate him in pamphlets as “a ‘reptile-like’ man who ‘crawled up’ into the Presidency, . . . an ‘Executive Ass,’ the ‘Accident of an Accident,’ ‘a famished Charles City pettifogger,’ the ‘synonym of nihil,’ or simply a man who should be lashed ‘naked through the world.’”23 As for the mass resignation of the cabinet, Tyler bid them good riddance. Most of them had been Clay partisans anyway.24 He wrote to a correspondent that he experienced no “uneasiness at the course of the vile conspirators” and that his health had improved since the mass resignation. His new cabinet, he noted, “is made up of the best materials. Like myself they are all original Jackson men.” And he vowed, “my friends the Clay Whigs if they have not already made the discovery [that they cannot harm me], will ere long I hope find it out.”25 The veto of a tariff bill in 1842 prompted calls for impeachment. In a message to the House of Representatives, Tyler complained that the committee appointed to consider the veto had instead “availed itself of the occasion formally to arraign the motives of the President . . . assailed my whole official conduct without the shadow of a pretext for such assault . . . [and taken action] unjust to myself as a man, as an invasion of my constitutional powers as Chief Magistrate of the American people, and as a violation in my person of rights secured to every citizen by the laws and the Constitution.”26 The House refused even to enter the protest on the Journal. Predictably, Whig excoriation drove Tyler closer to the Democrats. When they captured the House of Representatives in the 1842 midterm elections, Tyler construed it as vindication for him in his struggle against his enemies.27 Yet the Democrats were not overly eager to welcome back a turncoat who had helped to defeat Van Buren in 1840. Not without reason, he referred to himself in the protest message to the House as “a president without a party.”28 His press organ, the Daily Madisonian, never referred to him as either Whig or Democrat but as the leader of “the Administration party.”29 It might seem, perhaps, that Tyler’s battles with the Whig Congress were mere squabbles for political gain. In the short run, they were. But Tyler’s enactment of the presidential role, his insistence that the office and not just its duties had devolved upon him, his exercise of veto power, and his justification of the veto on constitutional grounds, all enabled him to establish his authority as president. Notwithstanding the circumstances that propelled him into office, he was as willing as any of his predecessors to assert executive privilege, to carry

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out his duties, and to withhold assent from measures that would upset the delicate balance of power. Robert J. Morgan concludes that “today we accept [executive independence] as a commonplace; Tyler had the courage and the foresight to set the precedent and to adhere to his independent position in the face of the vilest obloquy during his four years in office.”30 Given the stalemate with Congress, it is not surprising that the Tyler administration had no lasting legacy in domestic affairs. But a beleaguered president might be especially prompted to seek achievement in the international sphere, where he exercises greater freedom to maneuver. Tyler’s goals included settling disputes with Great Britain and establishing diplomatic relations with China. He achieved these objectives and more. The principal reason Daniel Webster remained in the cabinet when his colleagues resigned was that the secretary of state was in the midst of negotiations to resolve a number of points of tension with Britain. These included the dispute over the precise location of the boundary with Canada, efforts to suppress the international slave trade, interference by the British West Indies with U.S. merchant ships, and the continuing practice of impressment. Progress was achieved on many of these fronts, especially through the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, which dealt with the boundary question. Tyler reported to the Senate on August 11, 1842, of the success in negotiating the treaty. He had determined, he said, to use the opportunity presented by the Ashburton mission to resolve matters by treaty rather than by continued efforts at arbitration.31 Acknowledging the difficulty of the slave-trade issue, the president placed the United States in favor of “the abolition of this unlawful and inhuman traffic.” We had taken the lead in declaring the trade to be piracy and had induced other countries to follow our example, he said, but so far without much success.32 And on the emerging question of Oregon, after informal conversations with the British minister, “so little probability was found to exist of coming to easy agreement on that subject at present that it was not thought expedient to make it one of the subjects of formal negotiations.”33 It would fall to Tyler’s successor to complete that task. Tyler’s 1842 report to the Senate was unusual in its sole focus on these negotiations with the British. More commonly, he would report on continuing progress in his annual message—which, then as now, typically was a laundry list of the activities of various government departments. His 1842 annual message, for example, “congratulate[s] you, fellow-citizens, on the happy change in the aspect of our foreign affairs since my last annual message,” referring especially to the successful negotiations with Britain.34 The 1843 message provided a further update. Sometimes, in addition to

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the annual message, the president would send a brief communication to Congress, such as his December 1842 note that hostilities between Britain and China had been terminated and that four ports were now open to British—and, he hoped, American—trade. The same note called attention to the Sandwich Islands, “just emerging from a state of barbarism” and of strategic importance because of their location.35 He would take further action on both fronts, in 1844 negotiating the Treaty of Wanghia, which gave the United States most-favored-nation treatment with China and access to five Chinese ports, and in 1843 invoking the Monroe Doctrine to ward off any British or French colonial interests in Hawaii.36 The annual messages convey an impression of an administration aware of international affairs and proactively advancing U.S. interests where feasible. Beyond this general claim, however, there is little evidence of the role of rhetorical constructions in overcoming obstacles to negotiation or in rendering the results acceptable to Congress and the people. One of Tyler’s biographers suggests that during a difficult moment in the Webster-Ashburton negotiations, the president intervened and spoke with Ashburton, easing his anxieties and smoothing the way for Webster to proceed.37 Evidence of this sort is rare, however, so it is hard to determine just what role presidential rhetoric played in the foreign affairs of the Tyler administration. In contrast, a sustained persuasive campaign culminated in the annexation of Texas, the most significant act of the administration and its preoccupation especially during the last two years. That story warrants examination in some detail. The prospect of acquiring Texas had been of interest to the United States since Americans had begun to settle there in the early 1820s. John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson both tried, unsuccessfully, to purchase the province from Mexico. The success of the Texas revolution of 1836 resulted in the formation of an independent republic, which promptly sought annexation by the United States. Tempted though he was, Jackson was cognizant of the political difficulties. He delayed recognition until his last weeks in office and did not pursue the Texan request for annexation. Neither did his successor, Martin Van Buren. In 1838, the Lone Star Republic withdrew its request for annexation, although Texans remained ambivalent about the matter. As Lyon Rathbun has demonstrated, Whig opposition to annexation was of long standing.38 In part, it reflected the belief that the American republic could not survive over such a vast geographic area and, in part, opposition to the possible spread of slavery. The latter theme had been developed as early as 1836 in the writings of Benjamin Lundy and shortly thereafter in

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the speeches of John Quincy Adams. In an age in which the national parties survived by avoiding discussion of slavery, the prospect of debating Texas annexation was, to say the least, a hot potato. But where Jackson and Van Buren had hesitated, Tyler moved boldly. He believed in Manifest Destiny, that the westward expansion of the United States was inevitable. He also believed that bold action would enable him to transcend his political situation as a man without a party and to unify the country under his leadership.39 And he thought that adding Texas to the national domain would benefit every region and interest. In 1841, Tyler urged Secretary of State Webster to consider annexation, but the New Englander was unalterably opposed, and Tyler did not press the point. In his first annual message, he said briefly, “The United States can not but take a deep interest in whatever relates to this young but growing republic.”40 But he took no further action, partly out of deference to Webster, partly from a desire not to imperil ongoing negotiations with Britain, partly because of the objections of Texas President Mirabeau B. Lamar, partly out of fear of northern objection to southern growth, and partly out of a desire to avoid possible war with Mexico.41 Meanwhile the Texans spoke of possible negotiations with Mexico and Britain—to achieve an armistice with the former and perhaps an alliance with the latter.42 Those moves, in turn, filled Tyler with a sense of urgency. When Webster resigned once the British negotiations had been completed, Tyler replaced him with his fellow Virginian Abel P. Upshur, a supporter of annexation. And then the president began to act. Tyler was particularly concerned by reports he received of a British plot to give commercial benefits to Texas if the Lone Star Republic would liberate its slaves. Each half of that bargain, of course, would threaten the U.S. South—first by providing a competitor for its cotton and second by offering a haven for its runaway slaves. Tyler and Upshur sent as a special emissary to London their friend, Duff Green, a newspaper editor and publicist. Green’s principal task was to help in negotiating commercial treaties, but he also was to be alert for any discussions between the British and Texans. He learned that a Texas abolitionist on his own had gone to London to try to arrange a commercial deal. Texas officials made clear to their London counterparts that this man, Stephen Pearl Andrews, spoke only for himself and did not have their support.43 His scheme came to naught, although British officials did say that they hoped that, in time, Texas and all the world would abolish slavery. The U.S. minister to London, Edward Everett, assured his government that there was nothing to rumors of such a deal, as did the British minister to the

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United States, Richard Pakenham. But Green took the rumors seriously. Rathbun gives little weight to the fear of conspiracy, observing that Everett could provide an authoritative denial.44 But Tyler did not trust Everett; as a Whig, the minister’s first loyalty was thought to be to Henry Clay.45 Tyler believed Green, whose information was consistent with other reports the president had received about intrigue in the British West Indies,46 as well as with the widespread Anglophobia of the early 1840s. For his part, Green believed that he was at liberty to speak more candidly than Everett. As he wrote to his wife, “I feel at liberty to communicate in my capacity as a private citizen what as a public agent Mr. Everett could not do.”47 Convinced that the British threat was real and that it would quiet any northern opposition to annexation, Tyler authorized Upshur in October 1843 to negotiate a treaty.48 Months before, a propaganda campaign had begun, focusing on the dangers of British monarchy to the American republic. Thomas Gilmer, a Virginia congressman and close confidant of Tyler, wrote a public letter calling attention to the British threat and urging, as he put it, the “reannexation” of Texas—reflecting the belief that Texas had been part of the Louisiana Purchase and had been unwisely ceded to Spain in the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819. Gilmer asked Aaron Vail Brown, a junior congressman from Tennessee, to forward a copy of his letter to Andrew Jackson.49 He did so and Jackson wrote a supportive reply that was kept secret until the following year. Meanwhile, in August 1843, the New Orleans Republican, a self-styled “Official Gazette of the General Government,” published a discussion of the annexation treaty, and the British consul at Galveston reported to his government that he had it on good authority that the materials for this and other articles came from a “qualified” Washington source.50 In his 1843 annual message, President Tyler introduced Texas annexation as a subject fit for “the calm deliberation” of Congress and urged its members to ignore Mexican threats of war that, he implied, were intended mainly to discourage legislative deliberation.51 Based on an informal poll, Upshur concluded that it was likely that an annexation treaty could receive the necessary two-thirds vote in the Senate. Negotiations proceeded in secret probably in order to forestall arousing early opposition in Texas. Early in the new year, Mississippi Senator Robert Walker published an influential pamphlet urging annexation. Walker was also a confidant of Tyler, and there is a close correspondence between his thinking and that of the president. Stephen Hartnett has undertaken an extensive analysis of Walker’s pamphlet.52 Two of its features are worthy of special note here. First, Walker

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defended annexation on the grounds that it offered benefit to every region of the country, not just to the South. Second, with respect to slavery, he advanced what has been called the “safety valve thesis”: that Texas would offer a place for slaves from Virginia and the upper South as soil depletion made slavery less profitable there. In turn, with a greatly reduced slave population, the upper South could more reasonably consider abolition. In other words, Texas annexation might offer new places for slaves to go, but the effect ultimately would be to weaken rather than to strengthen the peculiar institution. Rathbun gives little credence to this argument, finding it belied by the South’s growing dependence on slavery over time.53 But Tyler believed it, having advanced the same argument himself in debates over the admission of Missouri in 1820.54 And it did have historical resonance, for it helped to explain how the once-slaveholding northern states had eliminated slavery in the years following the American Revolution. Not long after Walker’s pamphlet appeared, Jackson’s February 1843 letter in response to Gilmer was published. Thoroughly convinced of the British danger, Old Hickory released another letter stressing that the moment for action was at hand. As Smith reports the effect of Jackson’s letter, “The opinions of the ex-President, a popular hero and prophet, were on a far higher plane than mere editorial dicta however clever or emphatic, and the sentiment of the people could not fail to be affected.”55 These communications, which reasonably can be seen as a coordinated campaign, prepared the way for Tyler’s message of April 22, 1844, transmitting the proposed treaty to the Senate. Indeed, in March the president was convinced that the treaty would be approved. Confident that Democrats would not abandon Jackson and believing that many Whigs would join them, Tyler was reported as having said to congressmen, “This Texas question will ride down and ride over every other.”56 In his transmittal message, Tyler made four basic rhetorical choices. First, like Walker, he defended the treaty on national rather than sectional grounds. He insisted that his motive was the general good of the whole people. He asserted that Texas had been part of the Louisiana Purchase and had been unwisely bartered away in 1819; now was the chance to correct that error through reannexation. Since the settlers of Texas were mostly Americans, they would bring to that new land the principles of civil liberty. Moreover, Texas enjoyed a healthy climate, fertile soil, and a future of commercial advantage. These were all matters of universal benefit. Additionally, there were benefits of annexation to each section. For the North and middle states, there would be new markets for manufactured goods; for the West, new markets

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for “beef, pork, horses, mules, etc.” And for the South, there would be the gain of peace and tranquility “as well against all domestic as foreign efforts to disturb them.”57 In other words, the South need not fear a free Texas as a magnet for fugitive slaves and a source of abolitionist agitation. Second, Tyler downplayed the slavery dimension of the issue. Unlike Walker, he did not articulate the safety-valve theory. He emphasized only that, in bringing about peace and quiet, Texas annexation would promote harmony rather than discord among the regions. It would “consecrat[e] anew the union of the States and [hold] out the promise of its perpetual duration.”58 This appears to have been a deliberate choice, probably reflecting Tyler’s belief that he must not raise but transcend the slavery issue, lest he inflame emotions and destroy the chance of ratification. Third, Tyler stressed the urgency of the situation and the need for immediate action to protect Texas, a priority even higher than any of the national or sectional benefits. Glossing over the fact that Texan ardor for annexation had cooled, he noted that Texas originally had requested annexation and never had formally withdrawn that request. Mexico continues to threaten Texas, he said, so the Lone Star Republic must seek a strong partner. If we reject her, she will look elsewhere for help, with consequences to the United States including loss of revenue, needless military expenditures, escalation of tensions, and threats to the United Sates from whomever Texas might choose as its allies. Tyler elliptically mentioned the reports of British intrigue and noted of Britain that “that one, the most powerful amongst them, had not failed to declare its marked and decided hostility to the chief feature in these relations,”59 referring of course to slavery. Annexation, Tyler said, offered the last, best hope to avert these calamities. “The documents now transmitted along with the treaty,” he said, “lead to the conclusion, as inevitable, that if the boon now tendered be rejected Texas will seek for the friendship of others.”60 In follow-up messages he was even more emphatic. He told the Senate on May 16, “if Texas was not annexed it was probable that the opportunity of annexing it to the United States would be lost forever.”61 He shared correspondence from Jackson and others warning of British intrigue. He defended the choice of private sources rather than official documents of the Texas government, noting that “it is not to be expected that any government, more especially if situated as Texas is, would be inclined to develop to the world its ulterior line of policy.” Then he made an explicit statement: “I entertain not the least doubt that if annexation should now fail it will in all human probability fail forever. Indeed, I have strong reasons to believe that instructions have already been given

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by the Texan Government to propose to the Government of Great Britain, forthwith on the failure, to enter into a treaty of commerce and an alliance offensive and defensive.”62 This appeal illustrates what Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca have called the locus of the irreparable.63 The claim of urgency not only justifies haste but also trumps procedural arguments about whether the timing and the process were exactly right. Fourth, Tyler sought to reassure Mexico that annexation was not a bellicose act and that the United States had no wish to threaten Mexico. He denied any sinister motives and reported that “to Mexico the Executive is disposed to pursue a course conciliatory in its character and at the same time to render her the most ample justice by conventions and stipulations not inconsistent with the right and dignity of the Government.”64 Nor, as he indicated in a follow-up message, would annexing Texas be a violation of any treaty stipulations with Mexico.65 Unlike Polk, who arguably was out to gain Mexican territory to the southwest, Tyler proclaimed Texas to be the limit of his ambition. And by bringing to an end the hostilities between Texas and Mexico (Mexico had withdrawn its recognition of the Texas republic and viewed annexation as a hostile act), annexation actually would help to strengthen world peace. Tyler believed that by proposing annexation he could reconfigure U.S. politics, uniting the Whigs and Democrats because neither Clay nor Van Buren could disagree. But they did, in letters written before Tyler’s message and published on April 27. Neither man was unalterably opposed to annexation, but both insisted that the time and the process were not right. Nor could Tyler imagine that his new secretary of state, John C. Calhoun, would come out so strongly in favor of annexation for the particular purpose of spreading the domain and influence of slavery, as Calhoun gratuitously did in a letter to British Foreign Minister Richard Pakenham that was also made public in April. These factors upset Tyler’s and Upshur’s predictions of ratification. Whigs voted against the treaty out of party loyalty, and antislavery northerners found in Calhoun’s letter the grounds for their opposition. Far from receiving two-thirds of the votes, the treaty was defeated on June 8 with thrity-five votes against and only sixteen in favor. This defeat did not stop Tyler; nor did it bring his persuasive campaign to an end. As when he first assumed office, this strict constructionist took advantage of an ambiguity in the Constitution. Ratification of treaties, of course, required a two-thirds vote of the Senate. But the power to admit new states rested with both houses of Congress, by majority vote. There was no precedent for acquiring new territory by annexing a sovereign nation, so it

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was unclear which of these two constitutional provisions (making treaties or admitting new states) took precedence. Tyler proposed to admit Texas immediately as a state rather than a territory, and accordingly invited the House to take action. He did so in a letter on June 10, 1844. Noting that he previously had communicated with the Senate because a treaty was pending, he pointedly observed that a treaty was not the only means to achieve the goal. He did not specify an alternate means, but coyly stated, “The power of Congress is . . . fully competent in some other form of proceeding to accomplish everything that a formal ratification of the treaty could have accomplished.” That being the case, he would be derelict in his duty if he “failed to lay before you everything in the possession of the Executive which would enable you to act with full light on the subject if you should deem it proper to take any action upon it.”66 But the president was hardly indifferent to the outcome. His letter set out to persuade the House by rehearsing the arguments in favor of annexation. He restated the economic and commercial advantages and emphasized that the issues were “no way sectional or local, but addressed . . . to the interests of every part of the country and . . . the glory of the American name.” He said that he had reviewed the arguments against immediate annexation, presumably those raised during the Senate debate, “without in any degree having been struck by their force.”67 Chief among those objections was the risk of war with Mexico, but Tyler assured the House that we would not violate any treaty stipulations with Mexico, that we seek friendly relations with Mexico, but that if we made negotiations with Texas conditional on Mexican approval, we would insult the Texans who, after all, were recognized by most of the world as a sovereign nation. The dangers of enlarging territory had not ensued after the acquisition of Louisiana and, besides, because of the invention of the steam engine it was now easier to exercise control over distant regions. Responding to fears of British intervention, Tyler warned all European powers to leave the Western Hemisphere alone. Significantly, Tyler restated the locus of the irreparable. Time was of the essence: “annexation is to encounter a great, if not certain, hazard of final defeat if something is not done now to prevent it.”68 He held this view, he said, even more strongly than he had a month ago. For this reason he was not particularly concerned about the manner of annexation “but whether it shall be accomplished or not.” And lest anyone have doubts, he pledged that, while the treaty seemed the most suitable route, “should Congress deem it proper to resort to any other expedient compatible with the Constitution and likely to achieve the object I stand prepared to yield my most prompt and active cooperation.”69

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Tyler’s letter, in short, was a rhetorical instrument. Ostensibly inviting the House to consider whether to become involved, he framed the issue as national, emphasized its urgency, refuted objections, established a hierarchy in which the end trumped the means, and pledged to approve a joint resolution to admit Texas as a state, should Congress so choose. It was probably his best opportunity to take advantage of increasingly favorable public opinion and to circumvent the obstructionism of the Whig leadership. During discussion of the proposed joint resolution, however, it was observed that the American people had not yet had the opportunity to express themselves on the subject of annexation and that the impending presidential election might give them an opportunity to do so. Accordingly, the joint resolution was tabled until after the election. Meanwhile, Tyler’s submission of the treaty had changed the election dynamics. It was not to be, as anticipated, a contest between Clay and Van Buren in which the annexation issue would be kept off the table. Guided by the pleas of Andrew Jackson and others, the Democratic convention abandoned Van Buren and nominated James K. Polk of Tennessee, an ardent supporter of annexation. Tyler had himself nominated as an independent, in case the Democrats had not come out strongly in favor of annexation, but seeing that they supported his policies and that his candidacy was not likely to succeed, he withdrew in favor of Polk. Texas became the dominant issue of the campaign; Lambert reports that it “excited political fervor throughout the country” and “swallowed up all the other issues relating to public policy.”70 Moreover, it appears that public opinion became more favorable to annexation—partly because of the growing influence of the Manifest Destiny idea and partly as a cumulative result of the lobbying of Abel Upshur before his death, the pamphlet by Senator Walker, and the persuasive efforts of other administration officials.71 Sensing the changing mood, Clay began to temporize, to moderate his earlier opposition, suggesting among other things that he did not think that the presence or absence of slavery was a valid ground on which to decide the issue. This antagonized some of his most staunch antislavery supporters, who had the option of voting their principles by supporting James G. Birney of the fledgling Liberty Party. Still, the election was close. If the slavery dimension of the Texas issue excited sectional loyalties, for the most part they were not strong enough to trump the dominant commitment to party that characterized antebellum politics.72 The outcome of the election turned on New York, where thirdparty candidate Birney received 15,000 votes, most of them probably at

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Clay’s expense, so that Polk carried the state by 5,000 votes. It would not be accurate to say that Texas alone decided the election. As Paul H. Bergeron noted, “voter tenacity and constancy” was the most notable feature of the results.73 Certainly, in light of the New York results, it is hard to claim that the 1844 election represented a clear mandate for the annexation of Texas.74 Yet that is exactly how many Democrats and Whigs alike saw the results at the time. And the outgoing President Tyler framed the meaning of the election in just this way in his fourth annual message. Even though he was now a lame duck, Tyler had not lost the rhetorical power of defining the situation. Without reviewing all the advantages to annexation he had discussed in earlier messages, he reminded Congress that “after eight years of feeble and ineffectual [Mexican] efforts to reconquer Texas it was time that the war should have ceased. The United States have a direct interest in the question.”75 But now Mexico threatened to reopen hostilities, probably as a result of the annexation treaty negotiations. Had the treaty been ratified, Tyler was confident, “it would have been followed by a prompt settlement, to the entire satisfaction of Mexico, of every matter in difference between the two countries.”76 Tyler explained that he had warned Mexico against invading Texas while the United States was considering annexation. The president then reminded Congress that one objection to annexation was that it had not received the approval of the people. Then he said, “The great popular election which has just terminated affords the best opportunity of ascertaining the will of the States and the people upon it. . . . A controlling majority of the people and a large majority of the States have declared in favor of immediate annexation. Instructions have thus come up to both branches of Congress from their respective constituents in terms the most emphatic.”77 One would not have imagined from the president’s message that the election results possibly could be ambiguous; it was as if there had been a referendum on this one issue alone. Since the people had spoken, Congress should act and act quickly. Certainly there was no need to wait for the newly elected Congress to meet a year hence. Therefore, Tyler recommended adoption of the terms of annexation “in the form of a joint resolution or act to be perfected and made binding on the two countries when adopted in like manner by the Government of Texas.”78 Congress duly proceeded to consider the matter but the two houses fell into disagreement. The House wanted to annex by joint resolution; the Senate, to renegotiate the treaty. The deadlock was broken only with a compromise bill that permitted the president to decide which means of annexation to pursue. Even this compromise passed the Senate only by the vote of 27 to 25.

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In permitting “the president” to choose, the evidence suggests that Congress meant the incoming President Polk. But the compromise bill reached Tyler’s desk for signature on March 1, 1845, when his term still had three days to run. Believing that the issue was so urgent that it could not wait for the new administration to get “up to speed,” and still having the legal authority of the presidency, Tyler made the decision in favor of the joint resolution. At the end of his term as at the beginning, he took advantage of ambiguity to enhance his power. Tyler’s last official act was to send a messenger to the Texan government to inform the Lone Star Republic of the U.S. decision for annexation. This narrative should bear out Morgan’s conclusion that “in the annexation of Texas there can be no question that from the moment Tyler decided to act upon the problem until he left the Presidency, he held the initiative.”79 As we have seen, he kept the initiative through acts of rhetorical leadership— defining the situation, emphasizing certain arguments and deemphasizing others, invoking the locus of the irreparable, conducting a persuasive campaign, developing a hierarchy of ends over means, and claiming broad public support. In turn, the Texas annexation debate would have far-reaching consequences. It began a trajectory in which sectional allegiances moved to trump partisan commitments, leading to the demise of the second party system. It focused southern discourse—despite Tyler’s attempt to the contrary—on the slavery question. This in turn seemingly gave credence to the northern radicals whose shrill voices warned of a slave power conspiracy. The competing conspiracy claims hardened the arteries of public discourse and led the nation on the path to civil war. Clearly Tyler was right: it would have been better if the debate over annexation could have been conducted only with reference to national rather than sectional issues. This too is evidence of his rhetorical sagacity. His error lay either in his failure to prevent John C. Calhoun from sending the Pakenham letter defending annexation as a means to spread slavery, or else in his acquiescence in the hope that Calhoun might mislead the British by focusing on slavery and deflecting attention from the U.S. commercial and economic interests in annexation. Historians are divided on the subject of Tyler’s and Calhoun’s motivation. But there should be no question that, in establishing the legitimacy and independence of chief executives who arrive at the office without having been elected, and in bringing about the annexation of Texas, John Tyler exercised rhetorical leadership for which our tenth president deserves more significant recognition than he has received.

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notes 1. The most recent works are Dan Monroe, The Republican Vision of John Tyler (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003), and Edward P. Crapol, John Tyler: The Accidental President (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). The booklet is Jane C. Walker, John Tyler: A President of Many Firsts (Blacksburg, Va.: McDonald and Woodward, 2001). Otherwise, the most recent substantial biography is Robert Seager II, and Tyler too: A Biography of John and Julia Gardiner Tyler (New York: McGraw Hill, 1963). 2. John Mayfield, Rehearsal for Republicanism: Free Soil and the Politics of Antislavery (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1980), 8. 3. Margaret L. Coit, John C. Calhoun: American Portrait (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), 357. 4. William J. Cooper Jr., The South and the Politics of Slavery, 1828–1856 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 176. 5. Robert J. Morgan, A Whig Embattled: The Presidency Under John Tyler (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1954), 152. 6. Since no candidate received a majority of the electoral votes, the Senate chose Richard Mentor Johnson, the only time in U.S. history that the Senate has elected the Vice President. 7. Seager, and Tyler too, 143. 8. Oscar Doane Lambert, Presidential Politics in the United States, 1841–1844 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1936), 5. 9. John Tyler to William C. Rives, April 9, 1841, John Tyler Papers, Reel 1, Library of Congress. 10. John Tyler to M. S. Sprigg, August 20, 1844, John Tyler Papers, Reel 1, Library of Congress. 11. See Seager, and Tyler too, 144. 12. Tyler to Rives, April 9, 1841, Tyler Papers, Library of Congress. 13. “Inaugural Address,” A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897, ed. James D. Richardson (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1897), 4: 36–39. 14. “Special Session Message,” Messages and Papers, 4: 40–51. 15. “Veto Messages,” Messages and Papers, 4:64. 16. Ibid., 4:68–69. 17. Ibid., 4:72. 18. Ibid., 4:180. 19. Ibid., 4:184. 20. Ibid., 4:330. 21. Seager, and Tyler too, 152. See also Morgan, A Whig Embattled, 42. 22. Oliver Perry Chitwood, John Tyler: Champion of the Old South (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1939), 249; Crapol, John Tyler, 20. 23. Seager, and Tyler too, 162–63. 24. Chitwood, John Tyler, 209. 25. John Tyler to Thomas A. Bookes, Esq., October 8, 1841, John Tyler Papers, Reel 1, Library of Congress. 26. “Protest,” Messages and Papers, 4:191. 27. Chitwood, John Tyler, 325. 28. “Protest,” Messages and Papers, 4:192. 29. Lambert, Presidential Politics, 60.

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30. Morgan, A Whig Embattled, 185. 31. “Special Messages,” Messages and Papers, 4:163. 32. Ibid., 4:167. 33. Ibid., 4:166. 34. “Second Annual Message,” Messages and Papers, 4:194. 35. “Special Messages,” Messages and Papers, 4:212–13. 36. Walker, John Tyler, 25, 44; Crapol, John Tyler, 155. 37. Walker, John Tyler, 25. 38. Lyon Rathbun, “The Debate over Annexing Texas and the Emergence of Manifest Destiny,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 4 (2001): 459–93. 39. See, for example, Seager, and Tyler too, 168; Cooper, The South and the Politics of Slavery, 183; Justin H. Smith, The Annexation of Texas (1911; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1971), 103; Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 65. 40. “First Annual Message,” Messages and Papers, 4:79. 41. These causes are discussed in Jesse S. Reeves, American Diplomacy Under Tyler and Polk (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1907), 92; Crapol, John Tyler, 178, 180. 42. See Seager, and Tyler too, 210; Norma Lois Peterson, The Presidencies of William Henry Harrison and John Tyler (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989), 194. 43. For a discussion of Andrews and his mission, see Madeleine B. Stern, The Pantarch: A Biography of Stephen Pearl Andrews (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968). 44. Rathbun, “The Debate over Annexing Texas,” 476. 45. Frederick Merk with Lois Bannister Merk, The Monroe Doctrine and American Expansionism, 1843–1849 (New York: Knopf, 1966), 11; Claude H. Hall, Abel Parker Upshur: Conservative Virginian, 1790–1844 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1963), 202. 46. See Peterson, The Presidencies, 186. 47. Duff Green to Mrs. Lucretia Green, August 16, 1842, Duff Green Papers, Reel 2, Library of Congress. 48. Kinley J. Brauer, Cotton versus Conscience: Massachusetts Whig Politics and Southwestern Expansion, 1843–1848 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1967), 58; Hall, Abel Parker Upshur, 198. 49. James C. N. Paul, Rift in the Democracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1951), 82. 50. Smith, The Annexation of Texas, 133. 51. “Third Annual Message,” Messages and Papers, 4:260. 52. Stephen Hartnett, “Senator Robert Walker’s 1844 Letter on Texas Annexation: The Rhetorical ‘Logic’ of Imperialism,” American Studies 38 (1997): 27–54. 53. Rathbun, “The Debate over Annexing Texas,” 477. 54. See Frederick Merk with the collaboration of Lois Bannister Merk, Fruits of Propaganda in the Tyler Administration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 24; Chitwood, John Tyler, 49. 55. Smith, The Annexation of Texas, 189. 56. Ibid., 171. 57. “Special Messages,” Messages and Papers, 4:307–8. 58. Ibid., 4:308. 59. Ibid., 4:312. 60. Ibid., 4:310. 61. Ibid., 4:318.

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62. Ibid., 4:319. 63. See Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 92. 64. “Special Messages,” Messages and Papers, 4:311. 65. Ibid., 4:324–25. 66. Ibid., 4:323. 67. Ibid., 4:324. 68. Ibid., 4:325. 69. Ibid., 4:327. 70. Lambert, Presidential Politics, 71; Joel H. Silbey, Storm Over Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 72–77; Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 574. 71. See Hall, Abel Parker Upshur, 207; Silbey, Storm Over Texas, 78–79. 72. For a discussion of voting and partisanship in the antebellum era, see Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York: Free Press, 1998), 90–132. 73. Paul H. Bergeron, The Presidency of James K. Polk (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987), 20. 74. Robert V. Remini writes, “The argument that the election of 1844 was a mandate for the annexation of Texas has long been put to rest.” Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy, 1833–1845 (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 507. 75. “Fourth Annual Message,” Messages and Papers, 4:341. 76. Ibid., 4:343. 77. Ibid., 4:343–44. 78. Ibid., 4:345. 79. Morgan, A Whig Embattled, 183.

James Knox Polk: The First Imperial President? karlyn kohrs campbell



“Who is James Polk?” sneered Whigs in the 1844 presidential campaign. A Whig circular declared, “He is destitute of the commanding talent—the stern integrity—the high moral fitness—the Union should possess at this crisis, and has twice been rejected for the Office of Governor in his own State—having no hold upon the confidence or affections of his countrymen at home, and no talent to command respect for us abroad he is not the man for the times or for the Union.” Still another Whig described him as “A blighted burr that has fallen from the mane of the warhorse of the Hermitage.”1 When Senator William Cabell Rives of Virginia heard of Polk’s nomination, he wrote to his wife: “[T]he polk-a dance [which was newly popular in Washington] will now be the order of the day, which I understand is two steps backward for one in advance.”2 When he defeated Henry Clay, an angry Virginian exclaimed, “[I]t is a disgrace . . . to have elected . . . that infernal poke of all pokes James K. Polk.”3 To many, “dark horse” Democratic nominee James Polk was a pig in a poke, and little was expected of him. Strangely enough, the Whigs’ sneering question endures. The teasing issues raised by contemporary challenges to authorship and postmodern assaults on independent subjectivity find an almost ideal subject in the rhetoric of James Polk. Clearly, he swam in the discourses of his time, a voice for Jeffersonian principles and the yearnings of Manifest Destiny. As a member

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of Congress and Speaker of the House, he was Andrew Jackson’s right hand man, and he adopted, expanded, and justified Jackson’s conception of the presidency. Like many others, he maintained the conventional view of the constitutional compromise that slavery was entirely a state matter. At the same time, he was an unusually able mouthpiece for these views, stating many of them more clearly and cogently than their originators. A nominee whose friends told a different story to each of the Democratic Party factions in order to elect him, he alienated each in turn by rejecting their patronage demands. Although Speaker of the House during the intense conflict over the gag rule, and although warned by southerners and northerners alike that annexation of the New Mexico and upper California territories would be fatal to the Union, he started a war in his determined pursuit of them, thereby taking the actions that would make civil war inevitable. The question, then, is to what extent was he a creature of his time who expressed widely held views, and to what extent was he an agent responsible at least in part for the terrible events that he set in motion? Briefly, James Knox Polk was born in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, but his family soon moved west into the territory that became Tennessee. He received an excellent classical education at the University of North Carolina, which included active membership in a debating society. Subsequently, he read for the law and became a lawyer. After his nomination as a presidential candidate, he promised not to run for reelection, a promise that probably was a political necessity in the face of the anxieties of the many aspirants who hoped to succeed him. Inaugurated at age forty-nine, he was the youngest president to date, but he had considerable political experience. He had served in the Tennessee state legislature (1823–25), was elected to seven terms in the U.S. House of Representatives (1825–39), including two terms as Speaker starting in 1835. He was governor of Tennessee from 1839 to 1841, although he was twice defeated for reelection by “Lean Jimmy” Jones, who taught him that clear argument and speaking to the issues do not always win elections. His nickname, “Young Hickory,” reflected his close relationship to his mentor and friend, fellow Tennessean “Old Hickory” Andrew Jackson. A considerable body of Polk’s rhetoric is extant from his years in Congress, his campaigns for the Tennessee governorship, and his presidency. In all of the available sources, certain comments recur, in particular, about his great skill in argument. Biographer Eugene McCormac, for example, writes of his report on the national bank while in the House that “Polk displayed those qualities that ever distinguished him in debate. . . . His preparation

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was exhaustive and his arguments clear cut and logical. His language was well chosen and dignified, but at the same time scathing and merciless.”4 He was reputed to be a skillful campaigner. James Phelan’s History of Tennessee described him as “the first great ‘stump speaker’ . . . always full of his subject, ready at retort, sophistical, quick to capture and turn the guns of the enemy against him, adroit in avoiding an issue whose result must be unfavorable, thoroughly equipped with forcible illustrations, humorous anecdotes, and a ridicule which ranged through all the changes from burlesque to wit.”5 What analysis should reveal, then, is powerful arguments clearly developed that enable those of us at a remove of more than 150 years to understand how Americans of Polk’s persuasion saw the world and how they justified these beliefs to themselves and others. In other words, I approach Polk’s messages in a way urged by James Arnt Aune, as “concrete instances of political judgment, embodiments of political philosophy.”6 In many ways, Polk’s discourse is iterative. He was a Jeffersonian throughout his life, as his rhetoric attests. His presidential rhetoric reflects the beliefs that came to be collected under the rubric of “Manifest Destiny.”7 His fourth annual message is the clearest statement of the notion of the unique legitimacy of the president as legislative leader and representative of all the people. Finally, his few statements about the issue of slavery and his willingness to proceed with the acquisition of New Mexico and upper California in the face of the threat that such territorial expansion posed for the Union is the final paradox of this presidency. Accordingly, I divide my analysis according to these themes: Jeffersonianism, presidential power, Manifest Destiny, and slavery.

jeffersonianism Polk was an inheritor of the Jeffersonian “revolution” of 1800,8 and he believed in limited government and a strict construction of the federal Constitution. In his December 15, 1847, veto of a bill authorizing internal improvements, he wrote of his “solemn conviction that the usefulness and permanency of this Government and the happiness of the millions over whom it spreads its protection will best be promoted by carefully abstaining from the exercise of all power not clearly granted by the Constitution.”9 He opposed all elements of the American System. In a debate in the House, he stated his political philosophy: “I would sell out the public lands at low prices—at much lower prices than they ever have been sold. I would have them speedily settled by

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a hardy race of enterprising freemen, who would feel that they have a stake in the Government. I would impose no unnecessary taxation upon them, to support any particular interest. I would relieve the burdens of the whole community, as far as possible by reducing taxes. I would keep as much money in the treasury as the safety of the Government required, and no more. I would keep no surplus revenue there to scramble for, either for internal improvements, or for any thing else. I would bring the Government back to what it was intended to be—a plain economical Government.”10 The twenty-five-page “Address of James K. Polk to the People of Tennessee, April 3, 1839,” which he disseminated at the beginning of his campaign for the governorship of Tennessee is an extended statement of his political views. In it one can glimpse the rhetorical skills that made Polk an effective stump speaker, debater, and defender of the Jefferson-Jackson faith. In setting forth his “Political principles and doctrines . . . that it may be known whether they be in accordance with those of the people whose suffrages I ask,” he described the nation’s founding: In the origin of the Government there were two parties. In the Convention that framed the Constitution one party distrusted the power and capacity of the people for self-government. . . . This party was not successful in the convention, and a constitution was formed which invested the new government with a few delegated and well defined powers, leaving all others to the States and the people, to be exercised according to their sovereign will. The parties in the Convention were the germ of the two great political divisions, which . . . are still contending for the mastery in the Government. No sooner was the government put in operation under the Constitution, than the enemies of popular control over public authority, attempted . . . a latitudinous construction of the Constitution. . . . [and] Alexander Hamilton, a professed Monarchist, . . . immediately began, by strained and unwarranted constructions of the Constitution, to enlarge the power and influence of the Federal Government.11

I quote at length because his narrative dramatizes the ongoing political conflict that will be reenacted in the forthcoming gubernatorial election. The agon is between populists and monarchists, between legitimate and “latitudinous” interpretations of the Constitution, and between good and evil for the destiny of the nation. Good finally overcame evil: “The war between these opposite and contending parties was fierce and unrelenting, but the Democracy ultimately triumphed. John Adams was expelled from power” to be replaced by “Mr. Jefferson, the distinguished head and founder of the Republican creed.” When Polk began his service in the House of Representatives under President John Quincy Adams, “the doctrines of the ‘prostrate Federal party’ were openly

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sought to be reinstated.” At this point, a hero appeared: “General Jackson, like Mr. Jefferson, brought the ship of State back to the ‘Republican tack,’” after which Polk rehearsed the struggle over internal improvements, paying off the public debt, and eliminating the National Bank, all resisted by “Mr. Clay and his Federal friends.”12 The tentacles of the Bank are described in ways that make it a foe worthy of Laocoön. His fellow Tennesseans, however, merited praise: “Through all these trying scenes, the people of Tennessee enthusiastically supported and applauded the President of their choice. . . . It was my humble but gratifying destiny, as one of the Representatives of Tennessee in the Congress of the United States, to take a willing and active part in support of all these great and successful measures of political reform.” Polk defined the central issue of the campaign as attempts to persuade voters “to abandon the Republican party, and to throw themselves into the arms of the Federal and Bank party.” What followed was a dialogic refutation of such arguments: I, in common with the whole Republican party, am represented to you as one of these changelings. In what have I changed? I opposed Henry Clay on account of his odious Federal doctrines, and his coalition with Mr. Adams, and I oppose him still. I opposed the high tariff policy, and I oppose it still. I opposed Internal Improvements by the General Government, and I oppose them still—I supported the removal of the desposites [sic], and I have not changed my language or my opinions in relation to that great measure. In fine, what single point is there, involving the principles of the great Republican party, in which my course has not been uniform since 1825, when I was first honored with a seat in Congress, down to the present day? I challenge those men who charge me and the Republican party with abandoning the principles which brought Gen. Jackson into power, to show in what respect I or they have changed or even wavered in our course.13

In effect, Polk turned the gubernatorial election into a canvass on his political philosophy. He won by a narrow margin, but his Jeffersonian views resonated with voters, and he drew some twenty thousand additional Democrats to the polling booths of Tennessee.14 The address is vintage Polk, strongly and forcefully argued, clear in its statement of principles, yet strategically developed as a dramatic narrative. In the dialogic give and take, in the deft use of attack, in the vivid language, and in the skillful defense and refutation, one glimpses Polk the stump speaker, who debated across the state in formats like those of Lincoln and Douglas in Illinois. The address is a representative anecdote of Polk’s discourse, particularly in terms of its espousal of Jeffersonian principles and its rhetorical tone.

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the powers of the presidency Polk’s presidency was part of a continuing power struggle between the Congress and the executive.15 Through his adroit use of the veto, among other things, Jackson had shifted the balance of power in favor of the presidency. Nonetheless, Polk became chief executive under a cloud. The death of Whig William Henry Harrison and the ascension of “His Accidency” John Tyler had eroded the authority of the presidency. To complicate matters, Polk narrowly won; “the Democratic percentage of the two-party vote was 50.7 percent,” and had it not been for the votes for James Birney in New York, it is “likely that the eleventh U.S. President would have been Henry Clay.”16 In addition, many seem to have assumed that Polk would be the pawn of more powerful political figures; however, as he wrote to Cave Johnson, “in any event I intend to be myself President of the United States.”17 Several factors contributed to the success of the Polk Administration. First, the president had a clearly defined, limited agenda. As recalled by historian George Bancroft, secretary of the Navy in Polk’s cabinet, at the beginning of his administration, Polk said, “there are to be four great measures of my administration,—The settlement of the Oregon question with Great Britain. The acquisition of California and a large district on the coast. The reduction of the Tariff to a revenue basis. The complete and permanent establishment of the Constitutional Treasury.” 18 Bancroft believed that the annexation of Texas should be added because, although initiated by President Tyler in a controversial move two days before he left office, Polk could have reversed his action, but did not, and told his cabinet that he approved of what Tyler had done.19 That Polk achieved all of these goals in his four years in office was chiefly the result of his careful planning and persistence and careful use of the rhetorical resources available to presidents in the inaugural address, and in annual, veto, and special messages.

Mobilizing Public Opinion Polk’s efforts to build support for his agenda in Congress and with the public began in his inaugural address. As expected, it reaffirmed Jacksonian principles on the national bank, the national debt, and the tariff. His conception of the presidency was adumbrated in the pledge that he would “not be the President of a party only, but of the whole people of the United States”20 and in his assertion that the executive veto power “arrests for the time hasty,

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inconsiderate, or unconstitutional legislation, invites reconsideration, and transfers questions at issue between the legislative and executive branches to the tribunal of the people.”21 It foreshadowed Polk’s commitment to expansion by supporting the annexation of Texas as beneficial to the Union,22 and with the somewhat surprising assertion that “Our title to the country of Oregon is ‘clear and unquestionable.’”23 A brief condemnation of antislavery agitation followed. According to Charles Sellers, “Polk had made a surprisingly favorable impression.”24 Polk used his cabinet and his annual messages to achieve his goals. Polk wrote to Cave Johnson that he intended to have “a united and harmonious set of cabinet counsellors, who will have the existing administration and the good of the country more at heart than the question of who shall succeed me.”25 Each prospective cabinet member was asked to promise not to absent himself from Washington for long periods, which had been common practice, and to resign should he become a candidate or an aspirant to the presidency or vice presidency.26 The cabinet usually met twice a week to discuss administrative matters (Polk recorded attendance in his diary), and all participated actively in the preparation of his annual and veto messages.27 Although Polk’s annual messages are long (thirty-one, thirty-five, thirtytwo, and forty-one pages in Richardson, Compilation of the Messages and Papers, volume 4, respectively), they are unusually well-argued and clearly developed, and Polk used them to justify his legislative initiatives and to mobilize public opinion in their support. At their best, annual messages resemble affirmative debate cases, rehearsing the values that are criteria for judgment, identifying the most important deficiencies that require action, and proposing the kinds of legislative solutions that appear to be most appropriate. As President Clinton demonstrated, well-argued State of the Union messages, even long ones, can be persuasive documents capable of engaging and holding the attention of the citizenry. In Polk’s time, most newspapers were partisan and contentious; one of Polk’s biographers claims that, in this period, politics was “the leading American spectator sport.”28 Polk understood that his annual messages could be powerful administrative instruments as disseminated in newspapers to gain popular and congressional support for his agenda. Sellers comments: “In his campaigns for governor of Tennessee, Polk had been a pioneer developer of this kind of documentary instrument for mobilizing public opinion,”29 which is well illustrated by his 1839 “Address to the People of Tennessee.” To maximize their impact, the annual messages were prepared over a period of months; preparation for the first, delivered on December 2, began in September; sections were read and

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discussed in the cabinet, then edited and revised until they represented the best possible statement of the rationales for policies. Moreover, in contrast to previous administrations, the reports of cabinet members were coordinated with the policies proposed in the annual messages. The result was that Polk’s legislative initiatives were administrative not just presidential proposals. Historian and cabinet member George Bancroft later wrote: “His administration . . . succeeded because he insisted on being its centre, and in overruling and guiding all his secretaries to act so as to produce unity and harmony.”30 Polk’s first annual message made proposals about all the Jacksonian issues, but the stamp of the new administration was clear in bold statements about expansion. It began with a discussion of the annexation of Texas, continued with an analysis of unsettled relations with Mexico, and adverted to negotiations with Great Britain over the boundary of Oregon, reaffirming that “Oregon is part of the North American continent, to which, it is confidently affirmed, the title of the United States is the best now in existence.”31 It reaffirmed the Monroe Doctrine, but what Whitelaw Reid later called the “Polk Doctrine” emerged, that the United States “claim[s] on this continent a[n] . . . exemption from European interference,” which extended Monroe’s injunction against foreign colonies.32 When Polk turned to domestic affairs, his first priority was reduction of the tariff. Here Polk demonstrated his abilities as a case maker by linking broad political principles to his proposal: “The Government in theory knows no distinction of persons or classes, and should not bestow upon some favors and privileges which all others may not enjoy. It was the purpose of its illustrious founders to base the institutions which they reared upon the great and unchanging principles of justice and equity, conscious that if administered in the spirit in which they were conceived they would be felt only by the benefits which they diffused, and would secure for themselves a defense in the hearts of the people more powerful than standing armies and all the means and appliances invented to sustain governments founded in injustice and oppression.”33 When Polk boasted of the success of the tariff of 1846 in his fourth annual message, he rehearsed these same principles.34 This first annual message was enthusiastically received. James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, the country’s most influential independent newspaper, exaggerated when he wrote: “Mr. Polk, in one bound, has leaped from the obscurity and common place of a country town in Tennessee, to magnificence and sublimity in the foreign and domestic policy of the United States and in the history of the world.”35

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The importance of the proposals for tariff reduction and the constitutional treasury was reflected in Polk’s diary, where he wrote on April 30, 1846: “I considered [that] the public good, as well as my own power and the glory of my administration, depended in a great degree upon my success in carrying them through Congress.”36 Five months later, on May 11, 1846, Polk sent a special message to Congress calling for a declaration of war against Mexico. That address as well as the second and third annual messages were devoted almost entirely to the war and are treated below in relation to Manifest Destiny. Next, I wish to discuss Polk’s efforts to persuade, even coerce, members of Congress to support his programs.

Putting Pressure on Members of Congress Polk was a skillful politician, sly, manipulative, capable of misleading others into believing that he supported their views when he did not.37 He was ambitious and determined, illustrated by his control of the cabinet and in his carefully planned and tireless political campaigns for the House of Representatives and for the governorship of Tennessee. During the first seven months of his administration, Polk persuaded the Congress to declare war on Mexico, to pass measures in support of the war, and to enact the tariff reduction drafted by Treasury Secretary Robert J. Walker. Moreover, he vetoed a rivers and harbors bill that was full of pork for many members of Congress.38 Sellers describes the first session of the 29th Congress as “the most remarkable congressional session of the 19th century,” during which “Polk was to display a brand of presidential legislative leadership that the country would not see again until the time of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.”39 Paul Bergeron makes this assessment: “Polk was highly effective in his working relationship with Congress across a span of four extremely difficult and challenging years. When the last session had ended, congressional leaders, as well as the rank and file, knew they had met their match in a man who was determined to preserve, defend, and exert presidential prerogatives and power.”40 Polk used every resource available to him. His actions were based on the populist assumption that the people’s will must prevail and, as he would argue in his fourth annual message, the president was uniquely qualified to represent the will of the whole people.41 The principles enunciated in his inaugural address and his proposals in his first annual message reflected the Democratic Party platform adopted at Baltimore, which Polk treated as a kind of popular mandate.42 When he faced congressional opposition from

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conflicting groups of Democrats, he wrote in his diary: “I . . . will appeal to the people for support. If the notice [terminating joint U.S.-British occupation of Oregon] is defeated[,] it will be by the war between these factions,”43 and later, “I will rise above the interested factions in Congress, and appeal confidently to the people for support.”44 Regarding the requested declaration of war with Mexico, he wrote on May 11, 1846: “I am fully satisfied that all that can save the Bill in the Senate is the fear of the people by the few Democratic Senators who wish it defeated.”45 After a conversation with Senator John C. Calhoun on this matter, he recorded: “I . . . stated to him plainly that if this great measure was resisted by a majority of the Senate I would make an issue with that body before the country.”46 Polk relied heavily on the administration’s newspaper, Thomas Ritchie’s Washington Union, to marshal the public opinion that was his ultimate weapon against recalcitrant Democrats. In his doctoral dissertation, Richard Bland claimed that the paper “represented the peak of presidential control over an administration organ.”47 James Pollard wrote, “Had it not been for the press, James K. Polk might as well have retired to a monastery instead of occupying the White House as far as his presidential contacts with the public were concerned.”48 Particularly in the case of congressional defiance in regard to war legislation recommended by the president, “the Union mounted strident attacks upon Congress.” Put bluntly, “he relied upon the Union’s editorials and articles as one of his strategies for ‘managing’ the Congress. From time to time, recalcitrant congressmen, particularly Democrats, felt that pressure of public opinion that had been galvanized by Ritchie’s paper.”49 Because of editor Ritchie’s limitations, however, Polk supervised the Union’s editorial columns, reviewed material before it was published, sometimes indicated the line he wanted Ritchie to take, and even wrote editorials himself.50 Pollard concludes: “As the record shows he was long concerned with the press as a moulder of partisan opinion, [but] he was only moderately successful in employing it.”51 Polk also pressured individual members of Congress, even threatening balky Democrats: “I have it in my power . . . by communicating the truth to their constituents to destroy them politically. . . . Perhaps their course may hereafter be better, but I am satisfied if it is so[,] it will only be from the fear of their constituents,” he wrote in his diary.52 For example, according to his diary, he declared to fellow Tennessean Andrew Johnson that “I should pursue my public policy, and submit my public conduct to the country, that I sought to control no man’s course, that he [Johnson] had a perfect right to differ with me if he chose to do so, and that if he did so[,] the people and especially his democratic constituents, who were my friends, would judge between us.”53

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Presidential pressure on uncooperative Democrats “was reinforced by ruthlessly excluding them and their friends from the federal patronage.”54 Polk’s reliance on popular opinion may be best illustrated by the war with Mexico. Sellers writes that members of Congress “were compelled to support the president because they knew he had calculated accurately the public’s reaction to the situation he had produced on the Rio Grande,” which is evidenced by quotations of statements by a number of congressmen reporting great public enthusiasm for the war.55 Senators became so annoyed by criticism in the Union of their failure to support the administration on military matters that they attempted to have editor Thomas Ritchie excluded from the Senate press gallery.56 Polk’s fourth annual message, dated December 5, 1848, is his valedictory and includes an extended analysis of the veto power of the president and a detailed defense of its role in the federal government.57 It is an excellent illustration of Polk’s skill in reasoning and in making his arguments clear and compelling. The content is strong evidence for the claim that Polk was addressing the public.58 He began by quoting the constitutional provision providing for the executive veto; then he continued: The preservation of the Constitution from infraction is the President’s highest duty. He is bound to discharge that duty at whatever hazard of incurring the displeasure of those who may differ with him in opinion. He is bound to discharge it as well by his obligations to the people who have clothed him with his exalted trust as by his oath of office, which he may not disregard. Nor are the obligations of the President in any degree lessened by the prevalence of views different from his own in one or both Houses of Congress. It is not alone hasty and inconsiderate legislation that he is required to check; but if at any time Congress shall, after apparently full deliberation, resolve on measures which he deems subversive of the Constitution or of the vital interests of the country, it is his solemn duty to stand in the breach and resist them. The President is bound to approve or disapprove every bill which passes Congress and is presented to him for his signature. The Constitution makes this his duty, and he can not escape it if he would. . . . In deciding upon any bill presented to him he must exercise his own best judgment. If he can not approve, the Constitution commands him to return the bill to the House in which it originated with his objections, and if he fail to do this within ten days (Sundays excepted) it shall become a law without his signature. Right or wrong, he may be overruled by a vote of two-thirds of each House, and in that event the bill becomes a law without his sanction. If his objections be not thus overruled, the subject is only postponed, and is referred to the States and the people for their consideration and decision. The President’s power is negative merely, and not affirmative. He can enact no law.59

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This is a model explanation of the process by which a bill does or does not become a law and of the limits on executive power. Polk then turned to the charge that “the Executive veto is a ‘one-man power’ despotic in its character,” and responded: “To expose the fallacy of this objection it is only necessary to consider the frame and true character of our system. Ours is not a consolidated empire, but a confederated union. The States before the adoption of the Constitution were coordinate, co-equal, and separate independent sovereignties, and by its adoption they did not lose that character. . . . That the majority should govern is a general principle controverted by none, but they must govern according to the Constitution, and not according to an undefined and unrestrained discretion, whereby they may oppress the minority.”60 He explained the underlying assumptions this way: “The true theory of our system is not to govern by the acts or decrees of any one set of representatives. The Constitution interposes checks upon all branches of the Government, in order to give time for error to be corrected and delusion to pass away; but if the people settle down into a firm conviction different from that of their representatives they give effect to their opinions by changing their public servants. The checks which the people imposed on their public servants in the adoption of the Constitution are the best evidence of their capacity for self-government. They knew that the men whom they elect to public stations are of like infirmities and passions with themselves, and not to be trusted without being restricted by coordinate authorities and constitutional limitations.”61 Here Polk’s Calvinist belief in original sin, his experiences with the venality of legislators, and his fear of the unrestrained popular will converged. He then offered a detailed analysis of all of the checks and balances built into the government, including the checks of Congress on the president, the check of the vice president in breaking ties in the Senate, the checks created by the nature of the representation in the House and in the Senate, which gives smaller states disproportionate weight, and the power of the Supreme Court to strike down laws as unconstitutional. He summed up the opposition to the executive veto this way: “The objection to the exercise of the veto power is founded upon an idea respecting the popular will, which, if carried out, would annihilate State sovereignty and substitute for the present Federal Government a consolidation directed by a supposed numerical majority.”62 Of equal importance, the message articulated the theory of presidential representation that first emerged in the veto messages of President Jackson. Polk argued, “In the exercise of the power of the veto the President is

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responsible not only to an enlightened public opinion, but to the people of the whole Union, who elected him, as the representatives in the legislative branches who differ with him in opinion are responsible to the people of particular States or districts, who compose their respective constituencies.”63 Here is the outline of what can evolve into the imperial presidency. In Polk’s thinking, the president stands apart, transformed by investiture into a leader who transcends regional interests, political factions, and petty concerns and, thus, can be the voice of an enlightened public opinion. In contrast, members of Congress are flawed humans who represent only parts or sections; they reflect public opinion that may be hasty or ill-considered, which, if heeded, might subvert the Constitution. The president becomes the protector of the system who stands in the breach to prevent the Congress from enacting unconstitutional laws. I cite at length to demonstrate how cogently Polk defended executive power, and how clearly he instructed the citizenry on the way their government works. In this final annual message, Polk also provided a rationale for the evolution of the imperial presidency, a process that would reach its apogee in response to the economic and military exigencies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

manifest destiny As noted earlier, Polk claimed that Texas and Oregon already belonged to the United States and dreamed of a nation that stretched from “sea to shining sea.” His tough stand on the Oregon boundary courted war with Great Britain, and his orders to General Zachary Taylor precipitated war with Mexico. This was a president willing to risk all to achieve his ends. His ability to force the Congress to support a war they did not want or approve of demonstrated the great powers of the commander in chief. In this area, Polk was both an inheritor and an innovator. He inherited attitudes that encouraged expansion, which included pride in the nation and its potential, fear of foreign influence, land hunger and the exhaustion of eastern soil, and the influx of hordes of immigrants. Expansion was justified by a doctrine of “natural boundaries,” such as the Rio Grande and the Pacific Ocean, a natural right to safety from foreign intervention, the religious notion that God intended the soil of the nation for its most productive use (coupled with prejudicial attitudes toward Indian tribes), a conviction that the nation had to grow or die, and a belief that Americans had a duty to carry

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U.S. democracy into new areas. These attitudes and beliefs were summed up in the phrase “Manifest Destiny,” first used December 27, 1845, by the Democratic editor and publicist John L. O’Sullivan.64 Clearly, Polk was an ardent expansionist. He believed, despite an 1819 treaty ceding it to Spain, that our right to Texas had never been abrogated; that although Texas had not claimed the Rio Grande as its western boundary, and the land between the Nueces and the Rio Grande had been in another Mexican department, Tamaulipas, the Rio Grande was its rightful boundary.65 Similarly, in the face of the fears of his secretary of state, James Buchanan, who urged him to reassure Great Britain and France that he had no intention of dismembering Mexico or making conquests, according to his Diary, Polk responded “that before I would make the pledge which he proposed, I would meet the war which either England or France or all the powers of Christendom might wage,” and that “neither as a citizen nor as President would I permit or tolerate any intermeddling of any European Powers on this Continent.”66 Texas independence and U.S. annexation did not provoke war with Mexico, nor did hostilities begin as long as U.S. troops remained on our side of the Nueces, but once General Zachary Taylor and his troops crossed the river and encamped on the shores of the Rio Grande, Mexican troops attacked them. When word of the attack and the death, wounding, and surrender of some dragoons arrived on May 11, 1846, Polk sent a previously prepared message to Congress requesting a declaration of war. It was debated briefly in the House and passed; then greeted with significant opposition in the Senate, but passed by a vote of 42 to 2.67 In his second annual message of December 8, 1846, in order to disprove the charges that he had provoked the war, Polk detailed the events leading up to the war, including the actions and statements of earlier presidents, emphasizing that Mexico had violated two treaties (of 1839 and 1843) in which she had agreed to pay damages awarded to Americans by a joint commission.68 There was considerable backlash against the war in the House, with many who had voted for the declaration of war now asserting that the executive was conducting “an unconstitutional war.”69 On January 3, 1848, by a vote of 85 to 81, the House, with a Whig majority, formally declared that the war had been “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States.”70 In a special message of January 2, 1849, Polk defended his actions as those required of the commander in chief: “When Congress have declared war, they in effect make it the duty of the President in prosecuting it, by

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land and sea, to resort to all the modes and exercise all the powers and rights which other nations at war possess. . . . The levy of contributions on the enemy is a right of war well established and universally acknowledged among nations, and one which every belligerent possessing the ability may properly exercise.”71 Once again, he is the constitutional lawyer beginning with the statutory or constitutional provision, offering precedents, and deriving presidential powers from what is entailed in the responsibility to prosecute the war. These principles are then applied to the Mexican War, to justify levying contributions, blockading ports, and capturing vessels, cities, and provinces. Here, in his war message, and in his second and third annual messages, one finds clear and powerful arguments in support of the almost completely unfettered powers of the president as commander in chief. Recall that Abraham Lincoln was in his audience as a representative from Illinois. As the war progressed, efforts to negotiate a peace treaty became exigent. Because of conflicts among the Democrats,72 only one commissioner, Nicholas Trist, was named to negotiate a peace treaty that would include cession of New Mexico and California to indemnify the United States. Polk attempted to recall Trist, but Trist remained, negotiated the treaty per his instructions, and returned with it to Washington. By that time a land-hungry Polk had decided to demand more than New Mexico and California as reparations, but he finally chose to submit the treaty to the Senate because it conformed to the instructions given to Trist and because obtaining additional territory would require a resumption of the war. Polk had been accused of starting the war in order to seize all of Mexico; if he rejected the treaty that he and the cabinet had approved previously, Congress might refuse to appropriate additional money on the grounds that it had become a war of conquest, and in the process, New Mexico and California might be lost. The Senate ratified the treaty by a vote of 38 to 14, with most of the Whigs and the Calhoun Democrats voting for the treaty; it was accepted by the Mexican Congress in May, and proclaimed by the president on July 4, 1848. Polk was delighted. In his message to Congress of July 6, 1848, he said, “The results of the war with Mexico have given the United States a national character which our country never before enjoyed.” New Mexico and California “constitute of themselves a country large enough for an empire, and this acquisition is second only in importance to that of Louisiana in 1803.”73 At this point, all of his presidential goals had been achieved.

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slavery and annexation: a paradox Like many of his contemporaries, Polk avoided discussing slavery whenever possible. He owned plantations, first in Tennessee, then in Mississippi, that were worked by slaves, and his view of the issue was, in the words of one of his biographers “quite as southern as that of Calhoun himself.”74 Like so many others, Polk held that slavery was entirely a state matter; that the sanctity of slavery where it existed was a fixed obligation imposed by the U.S. Constitution, and that those who raised the issue of its removal from the District of Columbia or its exclusion from new territories were acting in partisan, malicious, and divisive ways. In The Impending Crisis, David Potter discusses this divided view, that responsibility for slavery was entirely a state matter, and patriotism required adherence to the inherited obligations of the Constitution, which induced the South to join the Union.75 Northerners who held these views abolished slavery in their home states, but held that they were not implicated in slavery in the southern states; however, they felt a sense of personal responsibility for slavery in the new territories. Southerners, likewise, were concerned. In the previously acquired lands of Louisiana, Florida, and Texas, slavery already was established, so the institution might continue unless specifically prohibited by Congress. In the proposed acquisition, slavery had been abolished by Mexican law, and according to international custom, this law would remain in force until new legislation was enacted by the U.S. Congress. Congress had never authorized slavery anywhere, and there was no hope that it would do so in this case. Accordingly, members of Congress from the slave states saw no advantage in adding this territory; southerners opposed acquisition and gave as reasons fear of slavery agitation, which might result in dissolution of the Union. Accordingly, a new doctrine was developed that argued that Congress had no power to exclude slave property from land that belonged to the several states, which was applied to Oregon as well as to the territory ceded by Mexico.76 Thus, slavery became a sectional question and a territorial question and a contest over the legal doctrine concerning the relation of Congress and the states to the territories, organized and unorganized. Finally, on August 12, 1848, as Congress adjourned, a bill was passed that excluded slavery and created a territorial government for Oregon, which Polk signed, explaining in a special “unveto” message that he accepted the free status of Oregon only because it was north of the 36°30' line of the Missouri Compromise. In that message, Polk recognized the overwhelming importance of the issue, and made this appeal:

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In the progress of all governments[,] questions of such transcendent importance occasionally arise as to cast in the shade all those of a mere party character. But one such question can now be agitated in this country, and this may endanger our glorious Union, the source of our greatness and all our political blessings. This question is slavery. With the slaveholding states this does not embrace merely the rights of property, however valuable, but it ascends far higher, and involves the domestic peace and security of every family. The fathers of the Constitution, . . foreseeing the danger from this quarter, acted in a spirit of compromise and mutual concession on this dangerous and delicate subject, and their wisdom ought to be the guide of their successors. . . . [T]hey left to the States exclusively the question of domestic slavery within their respective limits. . . . 77

Polk here alluded to the fear of slave revolts, but the primary appeal is to the ethos of the Founders and the authority of the Constitution. He also recalled the compromises effected over Missouri and Texas. He then added another, somewhat ironic, appeal: “We have now become an example for imitation to the whole world. The friends of freedom in every clime point with admiration to our institutions. Shall we, then, . . . peril all our blessings by despising the lessons of experience and refusing to tread in the footsteps which our fathers have trodden. And for what cause would we endanger our glorious Union?”78 He concluded by quoting from the Farewell Address in which Washington warned of the dangers of political conflicts based on geography. Likewise, in his final annual message, Polk pleaded with Congress to create territorial governments for New Mexico and California. He asked: “Shall the dissimilarity of the domestic institutions in the different States prevent us from providing for them suitable governments? These institutions existed at the adoption of the Constitution, but the obstacles which they imposed were overcome by that spirit of compromise which is now invoked.” He appealed to the unity forged in fighting the Mexican War, saying that as the veterans “resume their pursuits in civil life, surely a spirit of harmony and concession and of equal regard for the rights of all and of all sections of the Union ought to prevail in providing governments for the acquired territories—the fruits of their common service.” Finally, he argued that the question was “rather abstract than practical,” questioning “whether slavery ever can or would exist in any portion of the acquired territory.” Finally, he made a legal appeal: “In organizing governments over these territories no duty imposed on Congress by the Constitution requires that they should legislate on the subject of slavery, while their power to do so is not only seriously questioned, but denied by many of the soundest expounders of that instrument.”79 The issue, in other words, was temporary; once they had governments or were admitted as

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states, the people of these territories would decide the issue; hence, Congress should refrain from acting. Clearly, Polk believed that compromise was possible and that the acquisition of these territories need not imperil the Union, although he seemed to recognize that this was an issue that transcended party, and he could not have been unaware of the arguments from southerners such as Georgians Alexander Stephens in the House and John M. Berrien in the Senate who predicted that agitation over slavery would be precipitated by acquisition of these territories, which would lead to the dissolution of the Union. For Polk, Manifest Destiny trumped such concerns. That, for me, is the overwhelming paradox of Polk’s presidency.

conclusion The question posed in the title of this paper was a bit presumptuous, although prompted by Polk’s overweening desire for territory, his authoritative exercise of the presidency, and his description of the transcendent role of the president vis-à-vis the Congress. In still another sense, Polk was imperious— ruthless, arrogant, determined, and convinced that his views were right and should prevail. One biographer writes that “He felt . . . that his own, and not the opinions of others, should dictate the policies to be pursued,” then cited this statement by another commentator on his relationships with the cabinet and members of Congress: “The President yielded his convictions neither easily nor for petty reasons. Politics influenced him. But he seldom forgot principles even though he had to sacrifice the friendship and influence of men as powerful as Senator [Thomas Hart] Benton of Missouri and to some extent the assistance of [secretary of state James] Buchanan.”80 Polk’s contemporary, Lucien Bonaparte Chase, a Representative from Tennessee, wrote: “The prominent trait of his character was extraordinary energy . . . [H]e was . . . distinguished for his untiring industry and his indomitable will.”81 Polk’s Diary repeatedly reflects consultation with members of the cabinet, but again and again asserts that the messages and policies were his own, that no substantive changes had been made. There is a recurring pattern in descriptions of Polk’s character and rhetoric that may explain his limitations as a persuader and leader. He is characterized as “[h]ard, dour, lacking in imagination, magnetism, the sense of the dramatic.”82 A speech that he made in the House on assigning public land for the support of education in Tennessee, an issue about which he felt

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passionately, is described as “like a lawyer’s brief in its detailed methodical presentation of the case.”83 John Quincy Adams, former Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard, wrote in his diary of Polk’s key speech attacking the National Bank and its head Nicholas Biddle: “Polk is the leader of the Administration in the House, and is just qualified for an eminent County Court lawyer—‘par negotiis, neque supra [Equal to the task, but nothing more].’ He has no wit, no literature, no point of argument, no gracefulness of delivery, no elegance of language, no philosophy, no pathos, no felicitous impromptus; nothing that can constitute an orator, but confidence, fluency, and labor.”84 It is a damning but shrewd assessment by a bitter political opponent. The biographer Sellers traces the development of his speaking style: “At Chapel Hill he had preferred logical appeals to reason, but when these proved ineffective with Tennessee audiences, he developed a new style that, despite its incongruity with his personality, eventually made him one of the most celebrated stump speakers in the history of the state. . . . [H]is speeches were still full of information and logical argument. But he had learned to spice this fare with sallies of wit and sarcasm. . . . But . . . it was something else that convinced them, ‘something in his manner and delivery that suggested the idea of labor, effort, power,’ something ‘deliberate, yet vehement,’ the sense he somehow conveyed of the strength and passion that were pent up and channeled by his disciplined will.”85 Polk was, in other words, a highly skilled debater, lawyer, and case maker who incorporated wit and sarcasm into his arguments. Lacking were the qualities that invite identification, that demonstrate empathy with the feelings and motives of opponents, or the pathos that moves others deeply. There are no eloquent passages; quotable sections invariably illustrate wellmade arguments that link constitutional provisions and precedents to specific presidential initiatives. Polk’s most powerful appeals ask audiences to follow in the footsteps of the Founders, of those who fashioned compromises in the past, of those who were able to put aside deep feelings in order to make concessions to preserve the Union. Polk’s rhetoric is important for what it reveals about the thinking of those who shared his views of slavery, of expansion, of the powers of the presidency, and of the role and function of the federal government. His defense of the veto power and his articulation of the role of the president in our system of government and of the powers of the commander in chief in wartime are significant presidential precedents that consolidated important expansions of presidential power.

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karlyn kohrs campbell

In two senses, Polk the individual can be held responsible for contributing to the antagonisms that led to the Civil War. On the one hand, his Mexican imperialism set in motion escalating sectional conflicts over slavery to the point that secession became inevitable. On the other hand, Polk’s limitations as a leader meant that he was unable to produce the kind of national discourse or to broker the kinds of agreements that might have mitigated these differences. What seems clear to me is that Polk’s continentalism was a necessary although not sufficient cause of the war that followed and that his logical rhetoric and his dour, arrogant, sly, manipulative, and imperious character made him a leader who could not address the intense emotions that had been aroused. Sellers may have said it best: “Literal minded and unimaginative, he had so little feeling for the moral dimensions of questions like slavery and expansionist aggression that he could not understand how other men were affected by them.”86 That is one answer to the question, Who was James Polk?

notes 1. Charles G. Sellers, James K. Polk, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957, 1966), 2:139,140. 2. Rives Papers, Rives to Mrs. Rives, May 29, 1844, cited in Glyndon G. Van Deusen, The Jacksonian Era, 1828–1848 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), 186. 3. Michael F. Holt, Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 192–93. 4. Eugene Irving McCormac, James K. Polk: A Political Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1922), 33. 5. (Boston, 1889), 377; cited in McCormac, James K. Polk, 147. 6. James Arnt Aune, “Public Address and Rhetorical Theory,” in Texts in Context, ed. Michael C. Leff and Fred J. Kauffeld (Davis, Calif.: Hermagoras Press, 1989), 49. 7. See Frederick Merk with Lois Bannister Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation (New York: Knopf, 1963). 8. I am aware of the ongoing debates among such historians as Lance Banning, Jeffrey E. Isaac, J. G. A. Pocock, and others, regarding the extent to which early U.S. political leaders can be seen as committed to republicanism or liberalism. See Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978) for a history of the emergence of republicanism. I choose not to enter these debates except to comment that Polk seems to be an extraordinarily clear instance of the commitment to republicanism. Of course, Polk referred to the veto as a defense of minorities and states’ rights, and in urging an ad valorem tariff for revenue, not protection, he used class-based arguments to condemn the protective tariff of 1842. From my perspective, that is very thin liberalism indeed. 9. James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents 1789–1908 (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1909), 4:626. 10. Register of Debates, 21st Cong.: 1st Sess, 692–700, cited in Sellers, James K. Polk, 1:152.

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11. (Columbia, Tenn.: J. M. Thompson, 1839), 3–4. 12. Ibid., 4, 4–5, 6, 7, 8. 13. Ibid., 14. 14. In his 1839 gubernatorial campaign, in a little over two months, he rode more than 1,300 miles through 37 of the state’s 67 counties making 43 scheduled and numerous impromptu addresses (Sellers, James K. Polk, 1:370). Polk’s election was a great achievement; he had increased the Democratic vote by more than 20,000: “Universally the Whigs blamed the result on Polk’s unprecedented exertions” (Sellers, James K. Polk, 1:373–74). 15. Jackson was the first president who came to the office free from obligations to the congressional caucus, which had become very powerful. See Charles A. McCoy, Polk and the Presidency (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1960), 20, 25. 16. Van Deusen, The Jacksonian Era, 188. There were four tickets when the 1844 campaign began: Liberty Party candidate James G. Birney, who received 15,814 votes in New York, which enabled Polk to win that state; incumbent President John Tyler, who withdrew on August 20, 1844; the Whig candidate Henry Clay, and Democratic candidate James Polk. 17. Polk to Cave Johnson, December 21, 1844, in Correspondence of James K. Polk, ed. Wayne Cutler (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993), 8:456. 18. “Biographical sketch of J. K. Polk,” typescript, Bancroft Collection, 25; cited in Sellers, James K. Polk, 2:213. 19. Sellers, James K. Polk, 2:215–16. 20. Richardson, Compilation of the Messages and Papers, 4:382. 21. Ibid., 4:375. 22. Ibid., 4:379–81. 23. Ibid., 4:381. 24. Sellers, James K. Polk, 2:211. 25. McCormac, James K. Polk, 287. 26. Ibid., 325–26. 27. Sellers, James K. Polk, 2:328. 28. Ibid., 2:325–26. 29. Ibid., 2:326. 30. Bancroft to J. G. Wilson, March 8, 1888, in J. G. Wilson, Presidents of the United States, 230, cited in McCormac, James K. Polk, 330. 31. Richardson, Compilation of the Messages and Papers, 4:397. Polk’s willingness ultimately to settle on the 49th parallel as the northern boundary of Oregon was seen by some as reneging on his promise to support those who argued for 54°40'′, which would have extended Oregon to the southern boundary of Alaska. 32. Richardson, Compilation of the Messages and Papers, 4:398. According to McCormac, “In a commencement address delivered before the Yale law school in 1903, Whitelaw Reid attached the name of ‘Polk Doctrine’ to President Polk’s declarations concerning European interference in American affairs,” which “acknowledges Polk’s important contribution to the great American policy of resisting European intermeddling with the affairs of the western hemisphere” (690). See also Whitelaw Reid, The Monroe Doctrine, the Polk Doctrine, and the Doctrine of Anarchism (New York: De Vinne Press, 1903). 33. Richardson, Compilation of the Messages and Papers, 4:405. 34. Ibid., 4:657–58. 35. Quoted in the Washington Union, December 8, 1845; cited by Sellers, James K. Polk, 2:348; see also The Diary of James K. Polk During His Presidency, 1845–1849, ed. Milo Milton Quaife, in 4 vols. (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1910), 1:109–11, 115–16, for indications of congressional reaction.

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36. Diary, 1:368–69. 37. McCormac, James K. Polk, 250; Sellers, James K. Polk, 2:127. 38. David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 19. 39. Sellers, James K. Polk, 2:310. 40. Paul H. Bergeron, The Presidency of James K. Polk (Lawrence, Kan.:, University Press of Kansas, 1987), 215. 41. One reason was a strong commitment to populism, partially a reaction to the disputed election of John Quincy Adams in 1828, which Jacksonians believed had been stolen through a corrupt pact between Adams and Henry Clay. Polk’s first speech in the House was in support of a constitutional amendment for popular election of the president, and began with the words: “This is a Government based upon the will of the People; that all the power emanates from them; and that a majority shall rule”; cited in Sellers, James K. Polk, 106. 42. Correspondence of James K. Polk, ed. Wayne Cutler (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), letter to James Buchanan of February 17, 1845, vol. 10:110. 43. Diary, 1:265. 44. Ibid., 1:345. 45. Ibid., 1:393. 46. Ibid., 1:378. 47. Richard A. Bland, “Politics, Propaganda, and the Public Printing: The Administrative Organs, 1829–1849” (Ph.D. diss., University of Kentucky, 1975), 214. Cited in Bergeron, 172. 48. James E. Pollard, The Presidents and the Press (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 229. This author underestimates Polk’s use of his inaugural and of his annual, veto, and special messages. 49. Bergeron, 178,182. 50. Diary, 1:351–53; 2:170–71; see also Sellers, James K. Polk, 2:450–51. 51. Pollard, Presidents and the Press, 252. 52. Diary, 2:41. 53. Ibid., 2:40. 54. Sellers, James K. Polk, 2:447. 55. Ibid., 2:419–20. 56. J. M. Lee, History of American Journalism, 261–62; cited in Pollard, Presidents and the Press, 246. 57. Richardson, Compilation of the Messages and Papers, 4:662–70. 58. Polk’s Diary indicates that the material on the executive veto originally was prepared for a veto message. When read to the cabinet, disagreement arose over its suitability for inclusion in an annual message; Buchanan argued that it did not “fall under the clause of the constitution which authorized the President to give to Congress ‘information on the state of the Union’” (4: 217–18). 59. Richardson, Compilation of the Messages and Papers, 4:662–63. 60. Ibid., 4:663. 61. Ibid., 4:664. 62. Ibid., 4:668. 63. Ibid., 4:665; emphasis added. 64. Van Deusen, The Jacksonian Era, 171; Lyon Rathbun details the extent and character of resistance to the annexation of Texas in “The Debate over Annexing Texas and the Emergence of Manifest Destiny,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 4 (2001): 459–93. This background makes Polk’s apparent blindness to the relationship between expansion and disunion over slavery even less intelligible.

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65. McCormac, James K. Polk, 408; in response to a letter from a committee headed by Salmon P. Chase, on April 23, 1844, Democratic nominee Polk wrote that he advocated unequivocally “immediate re-annexation.” Printed in Washington Globe, May 6, 1844; cited in McCormac, James K. Polk, 226. In his History of the Polk Administration (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1850), Lucien Bonaparte Chase, a congressman from Tennessee who strongly supported Polk, details bases for claiming the Rio Grande as the Texas boundary. See 82–83, 95, passim. 66. Diary, 1:398. 67. McCormac, James K. Polk, 415. 68. Richardson, Compilation of the Messages and Papers, 4:471–506. 69. McCormac, James K. Polk, 462. 70. Ibid., 530. 71. Richardson, Compilation of the Messages and Papers, 4:674. 72. See McCormac, James K. Polk, 488–89. 73. Richardson, Compilation of the Messages and Papers, 4:587, 588. 74. McCormac, James K. Polk, 646; Polk initially cleared a 970-acre tract in Fayette County, Tennessee, for a cotton plantation; at that time he owned fifteen slaves (Sellers, James K. Polk, 1:186). It was sold in 1834; in 1835 he purchased another with his brother-in-law, Dr. Joseph Caldwell, in Yalibusha County, Mississippi. That land initially was cleared by some eighteen slaves of each owner (Sellers, James K. Polk, 1:249). In Chapter 4, “The Polk Overseers,” 86–97, of The Insolent Slave (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), William E. Wiethoff uses the troubled relationship between James and Sarah Childress Polk and their overseers on their Mississippi plantation as an example of the difficulties of controlling slaves. He details the repeated runaways, and the beatings, murders, and sales that were usually futile efforts to control the twenty to thirty slaves who worked there. 75. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 46–48. 76. McCormac, James K. Polk, 623–24. 77. Richardson, Compilation of the Messages and Papers, 4:607. 78. Ibid., 4:609. 79. Ibid., 4:640, 641. 80. Henry Barrett Learned, Some Aspects of the Cabinet Meeting (Washington, 1915), 124; cited in McCormac, James K. Polk, 327. 81. Chase, History of the Polk Administration, 10. 82. Van Deusen, The Jacksonian Era, 240. 83. Polk’s speech is at Reg. Deb. 20.1: 2496–500; Sellers, James K. Polk, 1:124. 84. Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, comprising portions of his diary from 1795 to 1848, ed. Charles Francis Adams, 12 vols. (Philadelphia, 1874–77), 9:64; cited in Sellers, James K. Polk, 1:217. 85. The quoted material is from Nathaniel Baxter, “Reminiscences,” American Historical Magazine (Nashville) 7 (July 1903): 263–67; cited in Sellers, James K. Polk, 1:277. 86. Sellers, James K. Polk, 2:214.

Franklin Pierce and the Exuberant Hauteur of an Age of Extremes: A Love Song for America in Six Movements stephen john hartnett

Radical Democrat and man-about-town Walter Whitman surveyed the nation from his beloved Brooklyn in 1855, and what he saw left him boggled, reeling from a confusion so deep that his only response was to produce poems that confounded each other in fantastic contradictions. In the closing lines of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, a book so sexy and strange that some reviewers assumed he must be mad to have written it, Whitman wrestled with his nation’s paradoxical ability to produce extremes: Great is goodness; I do not know what it is any more than I know what health is. . . . But I know it is great. Great is wickedness. . . . I find I often admire it just as much as I admire goodness: Do you call that a paradox? It certainly is a paradox. The eternal equilibrium of things is great, and the eternal overthrow of things is great, And there is another paradox.

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overture Published during the third summer of the presidency of Franklin Pierce, these lines illustrate the period’s unnerving oscillation between extremes, its manic rocketing from goodness to wickedness, from equilibrium to overthrowing, all the while rolling along in a magnificent burst of exuberance. Simultaneously thrilling and terrifying, beautiful and barbarous, one can imagine the nation barking into the wind along with Whitman, “Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then. . . . I contradict myself.”1 Franklin Pierce, a New Hampshire Democrat from a celebrated family full of Revolutionary War stories and holders of high office, a man groomed his entire life for power, was the unlucky soul who found himself moving into the White House in the spring of 1853. Favored by the “Young America” branch of the Democrats, uncommonly handsome, accomplished as a public speaker, slick on the dance floor, and prone to heavy social drinking, Pierce carried himself with a youthful verve that from a distance could appear positively Whitmanesque. On the other hand, Pierce’s life-long hatred of all radicals and “ultras,” his uncompromising commitment to gentlemanly decorum, and his well-bred sense of his (and his class’s) privilege and prestige lent to the fourteenth president an unmistakable air of the snooty. Indeed, by responding to political crises with a sense of aggrieved entitlement, with smug disdain, with what can only be called hauteur, Pierce turned his presidency into what many historians argue was a monumental failure. By describing Pierce as a man of exuberant hauteur I hope to invoke the ghost of Robert Gunderson. In “The Oxymoron Strain in American Rhetoric” Gunderson asked rhetorical historians to approach the dazzling extremes of our national history by studying such oxymoronic characters as “fighting Quakers . . . conforming individualists . . . transcendental opportunists . . . honest grafters . . . repressive champions of liberty . . . [and] lustful moralists.” In this sense, Pierce’s exuberant hauteur, like Whitman’s admiring wickedness and goodness, may be understood as part of his culture’s oxymoronic mingling of extremes. More than just an observation about America’s long-standing ability to absorb contradictory impulses, my invoking Gunderson’s notion of the oxymoron strain in our national rhetoric also obliges me to reconstruct the complicated political contexts driving Pierce’s exuberant hauteur, and hence to demonstrate that Pierce was saddled with the presidency in an age of such extremes that leading the nation was becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible.2 I reconstruct this age of extremes and Pierce’s response to it by offering six chronologically organized movements that merge historical contextualization

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and rhetorical analysis. Considering the central importance of slavery to the political landscape of the antebellum United States, Section One sets the stage for Pierce’s presidency and his life-long hatred of abolitionists by examining the controversy surrounding the 1850 Compromise in general and its Fugitive Slave Law in particular. Having established Pierce as the moderate’s choice to oppose the extremism of radical abolitionists and southern secessionists alike, Section Two tracks Pierce’s meteoric rise from New Hampshire lawyer and party stalwart to president. Section Three analyzes his inaugural address and first annual message, which illustrate Pierce’s apolitical responses to political dilemmas. Section Four examines his veto of Dorothea Dix’s bill for the indigent insane, which offered Pierce’s most extended treatise on the states’ rights and minimalist government principles of Jacksonian Democracy. Section Five explores Pierce’s third annual message and two additional pronouncements on the Kansas-Nebraska crisis, which demonstrate how his rhetoric, despite his stated goal of championing moderation and prudence, in fact escalated political tensions by portraying one side of the Kansas-Nebraska disputants as extremists threatening the Union. Section Six turns to the final days of Pierce’s presidency and his controversial farewell address, which triggered six weeks of fierce debate in Congress and left the nation lurching toward war. While Pierce appears in each of these sections as a man overmatched by both circumstances and political competitors, I hope my comments on the period’s turmoil in general and some of its more significant characters in particular amount to a love song for my nation, to a tribute in six movements to our forebears’ struggles with the paradoxes and possibilities of democracy in an age of extremes. Indeed, I hope readers will proceed with me into the essay bearing a generous sense of wonder at the immensity of the complications faced by Pierce and his contemporaries.

first movement: “this fair mystery” and the 1850 fugitive slave law “There is infamy in the air. . . . I wake in the morning with a painful sensation, . . . [it] is the odious remembrance of that ignominy . . . which robs the landscape of beauty, [and] takes the sunshine out of every hour.” Thus Ralph Waldo Emerson described his reaction to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. Delivered on May 3, 1851, Emerson’s “Address to the Citizens of Concord” is one of the most brilliantly outraged orations in our national history. Speaking in what can only be described as a tone of disgust, Emerson referred to

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the Law as “the late disgrace,” to its passage as evidence of “the shallowness of leaders,” and to its proponents as champions of “the greatest calamity in the universe, negro slavery.” Emerson’s anger was based on the fact that the Fugitive Slave Law drafted all Americans into the nasty business of catching runaway slaves. “[T]he whole wealth and power of Boston, . . . are thrown into the scale of the crime,” Emerson seethed, thus protesting how the Law rendered even the most ardent abolitionists complicit with the South’s machinery of brutality. Emerson’s response to this “suicidal” law was threefold: legal, political, and existential. Legally, he drew upon Cicero, Grotius, Coke, Blackstone, Montesquieu, Vattel, Burke, and Jefferson to argue that any secular law contradicting higher moral sensibilities was null and void. Leveraging this “higher law” argument against the Fugitive Slave Law led Emerson to his political argument: “This law must be made inoperative. It must be abrogated and wiped off the statute book; but, whilst it stands there, it must be disobeyed,” because “an immoral law makes it a man’s duty to break it.” Calling for transcendentally sanctioned civil disobedience brought Emerson to the heart of his argument regarding our existential need for justice: “I thought that every time a man goes back to his own thoughts, these angels receive him, talk with him, and, that, in the best hours, he is uplifted in virtue of this essence, into a peace and into a power which the material world cannot give; that these moments counterbalance the years of drudgery, and that this owning of a law, be it called morals, religion, or godhead, or what you will, constituted the explanation of life, the excuse and indemnity for the errors and calamities which sadden it. . . . I thought it was this fair mystery, . . . which made the basis of human society.”3 For Emerson, the Fugitive Slave Law was judicially wrong, politically wrong, and spiritually wrong. It violated every aspect of the human condition, leaving citizens of good will ashamed: “No man can look his neighbor in the face,” Emerson protested, “We sneak about with the infamy of crime.” Writing in the biblical tones that made him one of the nation’s most beloved (by some) and feared (by others) voices of protest, John Greenleaf Whittier echoed Emerson’s disgust: “The evil days have come,” he warned, “Dear Lord! Between that law and thee/ No choice remains.” Whereas Emerson and Whittier attacked the Law in high-minded jeremiads and poems, their fellow activists were blunter. Speaking that March in Boston’s Faneuil Hall, African American abolitionist Samuel Ringgold Ward declared that the Fugitive Slave Law obliged northerners “to lick up the spittle of the slavocrats, and swear it is delicious.” Never one to lick up another man’s spittle, Emerson declared that “Such an Union, is intolerable.” Ward stated the problem in even

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more ominous terms: “Such crises as these leave us the right of Revolution, and if need be, that right we will, at whatever cost, most sacredly maintain.” Speaking in the Syracuse, New York, city hall that October, the escaped slave and underground railroad conductor Reverend Jermain Wesley Loguen put the matter simply: “I don’t respect this law—I don’t fear it—I won’t obey it! . . . and if force is employed to re-enslave me, I shall make preparations to meet the crisis as becomes a man.” From the safe distance of over 150 years later, these lines sound wondrously courageous—you would like to imagine yourself siding with the abolitionists—but at the time such language struck many if not most Americans as irresponsible calls to break the law, if not to engage in violence. On the other hand, activists such as Emerson, Whittier, Ward, and Loguen argued tirelessly that the Fugitive Slave Law enabled southerners to extend the violence necessary to police a slave culture into the free North. From this perspective, the Fugitive Slave Law was seen as a thunderclap of evil. Regardless of one’s response to the Law in particular, the debates it triggered pointed to the fact that the nation was on the verge of a crisis regarding its complicated interweaving of freedom and slavery.4 Indeed, while Emerson, Whittier, Ward, Loguen and their allies lit up the North with fiery polemics, so northern proslavery forces were also eager to meet the crisis “as becomes a man.” For example, Captain Isaiah Rynders led a mob of antiabolitionists, calling themselves the Union Safety Committee, in an attack on the May 7, 1850, meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society. New York City was abuzz over the presence of so many radicals, including William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Burleigh, and Frederick Douglass, yet the city never heard what the abolitionists had to say that day, for Rynders and his thugs broke up the meeting, proving that extremists using free speech would be met by extremists using violence. Responding to the crisis in a manner “as becomes a man” may be understood in this sense as responding like a goon, a bully, someone willing (and even eager) to use physical force to squelch political debate.5 Although not advocating violence of this free-speech-destroying nature, it is nonetheless clear that Emerson, Whittier, Ward, and Loguen reserved the right to defend themselves when attacked. The nightmare scenario of free discussion sinking into violence was in fact played out across the nation in scrapes and scuffles throughout 1850 and 1851; it finally rose to the full promise of its horror on September 11, 1851, in Christiana, Pennsylvania, where a small army of runaway slaves, free blacks, and white abolitionists again met the crisis as becomes men. The battle erupted when Edward Gorsuch attempted to retrieve four slaves who had recently escaped from his

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farm in Maryland, just across the Pennsylvania border. The runaway slaves were supported in their attempt to rebuff Gorsuch by over one hundred local residents, with the ensuing melee leaving Gorsuch dead, his son wounded badly, scores of both whites and blacks either clubbed, shot, or beaten, and the nation reeling from the sense that the future was likely full of such violence. What Emerson had so lovingly referred to as “this fair mystery,” our spiritual need for justice, was clearly sinking beneath the collective fury of those extremists—pro- and antislavery, northern and southern—who chose to respond to the crisis launched by the 1850 Compromise “as becomes a man.”6 Many southerners were equally appalled by the grinding debates and political horse trading that led to compromises that they too found insulting, although for reasons different from those cited by Emerson and his colleagues. In fact, following the passage of the 1850 Compromise, talk of secession blossomed in Virginia, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Georgia, where traditional elitists grumbled, as William Freehling describes it, “With scum ruling the herd, democracy became a disaster.” As was so often the case, however, such hard talk not only led nowhere but in fact bolstered moderates; hence the state elections in Mississippi in the fall of 1850 found Unionists (derisively called Submissionists by their foes!) winning 57 percent of the vote, thus proving that even in the deep South extremism was not attractive to the vast majority of moderates. Indeed, responding “as becomes a man” in those tumultuous years need not mean wielding secessionist rhetoric or burning brands. Rather, as moderates throughout the nation proved, citizens could hold themselves above the fray, refuse to traffic in violence, eschew all forms of sectionalism and extremism, and cling fervently to the Constitution and the Union. For example, in summarizing the local Whig response to the Compromise of 1850, the Alton [Illinois] Telegraph & Democratic Review observed that while “The law in question may be defective” and may be “unnecessarily severe. . . . So long as it shall remain on the Statute book of the United States, it will be the bounden duty of every good citizen to interpose no resistance to its execution.” While this law-respecting and faction-rejecting position failed him in the presidential elections of 1844, when he was beaten by the expansionist James K. Polk, Henry Clay’s lifelong commitment to moderation earned him wide respect and the flattering moniker “The Great Compromiser.” Like Clay, Boston’s favorite son and the Whig’s great hope, Daniel Webster, also pursued a course of moderation and prudence, which explains why Emerson assailed him as a craven lackey beholden to slavery interests and why Whittier portrayed him as “So fallen!

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So lost!” But in this regard Emerson and Whittier were on the margins of popular opinion, for most Americans then (as now) wished for nothing more than the ability to go about their daily business without being bothered by the passionate pleas of extremists.7 Which explains why Franklin Pierce, life-long Democrat, met with Webster, life-long Whig, in the fall of 1850: the two moderates bonded over their shared enthusiasm for the Union-saving Compromise. Pierce’s loyalty to the Democratic Party was so complete that some of his followers sought to puff him up with the nickname “Young Hickory,” as if he were the second coming of Andrew Jackson. Nonetheless, when Pierce spoke throughout New England that autumn, moderate Whigs and Democrats alike thought they were witnessing the rise not so much of another nullifier as another great compromiser, another truly gentle-man devoted to preserving the Union at all costs. Neither as radical as Emerson, Whittier, Ward, Loguen, and their fellow northern abolitionists, nor as brutish as Rynders and the proslavery men he worked for, nor as willing to threaten disunion as many southern Democrats, Pierce would be the moderate’s moderate, the reasonable Union man of unflinching decorum and unwavering propriety. In May of 1851, with the Democrats casting about for a presidential candidate, the proslavery Richmond Enquirer sent to potential candidates public queries regarding their position on the Compromise of 1850. The questions were landmines laid for the unwary, for an imprudent answer could lose the southern support necessary for any would-be candidate to receive serious consideration for the nomination. Echoing the vague Union-at-all-costs prudence made famous by Webster and Clay and all those moderates committed to the Compromise, Pierce responded that “If the compromise measures are not to be substantially and firmly maintained, the plain rights secured by the constitution will be trampled in the dust. . . . I will never yield to a craven spirit, that . . . would endanger the Union.” This meant Pierce would enforce the Fugitive Slave Law and the other provisions of the 1850 Compromise, thus rendering him serviceable to the Democratic Party, which was always in need of “doughfaces” (northern candidates amenable to southern interests).8 Pierce was thus in a difficult rhetorical situation, for he needed to demonstrate loyalty to southern proslavery interests without appearing to northerners to be merely a lackey for the Slave Power, while he needed to demonstrate loyalty to northern interests without appearing to southerners to be harboring secret abolitionist hopes. Pierce’s answer to this rhetorical dilemma was to stake out a bold position of uncompromising moderation: he would abhor all “ultras,” whether northern or southern, and would cling

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to the steady middle, to the great mass who feared radicalism of any variety. By questioning both the efficacy and morality of this strategy, extremists of all sorts would do their best to make sure such rhetorical balancing acts would fail. For example, Ward summarized nicely the abolitionists’ rejection of moderation when he argued that “compromise . . . is always the term which makes right yield to wrong.” But Pierce—at least at this early, stillcharmed point in his career—had the knack for avoiding controversy. In fact, he was gifted with the uncanny ability to make even the yielding of right to wrong look right, or at least good, for as everyone who met him commented, “Young Hickory” was an exceptionally, almost hypnotically likable man.9

second movement: the “gracefully attractive” mr. pierce rises to power As one of his biographers, Larry Gara, describes Pierce, “Young Hickory’s” “main assets were family background, total loyalty to the Democratic Party, a willingness to be a party hatchet-man, and, above all, his charm and striking appearance. . . . Handsome and well-groomed, he influenced others by a pleasing habit of appearing to agree with whomever he was conversing.” Allan Nevins observes that Pierce was indeed a gentleman’s gentleman. He was “one of the quickest, most gracefully attractive . . . men who have held his high office,” Nevins writes, and “was gay, loquacious, bubbling over with kindness, and beguilingly demonstrative.” As figure 1 demonstrates, drawings of Pierce tended to emphasize his manly, Byronic shock of unruly hair and his dreamy saucer-sized eyes, hence portraying him as a source of Romantic energy. But as figure 2 demonstrates, Pierce was also a man who wore a uniform well, who thrust his hand confidently into his jacket, and who stared with assured dignity into the camera. Along with his electric good looks and elegant manner, Pierce was a fine public speaker. After short and undistinguished stints as a U.S. congressman (1833–37) and senator (1837–42), Pierce returned to a lucrative career as one of New Hampshire’s premier trial lawyers. Pierce’s most approving biographer, Roy Franklin Nichols, describes his persuasive powers during these years in terms that verge on the biblical: “He was a master of his voice. . . . Observers recalled in later years how his intense efforts in concentration caused a glow to suffuse his countenance, which some even described as giving the effect of a halo. He didn’t convince juries, he converted them.” While the haloed Pierce may have thus converted juries, he was no Puritan. In fact, Pierce was a heavy social drinker who loved

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Fig. 1. This undated etching depicts “Young Hickory” as a romantic star, all doe-eyed and tousle-haired; courtesy New Hampshire Historical Society.

Fig. 2. This 1848 daguerreotype would later be used by Democrats to counteract Whig charges that Pierce was “the fainting General;” courtesy New Hampshire Historical Society.

to dance. His wife, Jane Means Appleton Pierce, suffered from depression and shrank from the intricate politicking of social events, which frequently left the dashing, apparently glowing Pierce free to weave his interpersonal magic late into the night. While Pierce earned the respect of his political

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elders by towing the party line and proving himself a trustworthy Union man, and while he persuaded audiences with elaborate and well-delivered speeches, every one of his biographers foregrounds the fact that he rose faster and farther than more talented men because of his ability to wow the easily wowed with his “gracefully attractive” manners. Thus combining youthful exuberance and elitist hauteur, Pierce embodied the paradoxes and contradictions that left Whitman and his fellow antebellum citizens so confused regarding the spirit of the age.10 When the 1850 Compromise was passed the Whigs held the presidency in the person of Millard Fillmore, a compromise candidate who lacked charisma and rose to the White House only when Mexican War hero Zachary Taylor died on July 9, 1850. It is not difficult to imagine Pierce’s supporters’ glee at the comparison between the Whig’s Fillmore and their Democratic prince: one colorless and bland, the other eloquent and handsome; the one famous for skewering his own party, the other his party’s champion; the one an awkward president given power by a stroke of misfortune, the other a graceful leader groomed his entire life for power. For Pierce optimists, the only significant roadblocks between their man and the White House were the party’s two leading statesmen: Michigan’s Lewis Cass and Illinois’s Stephen Douglas. But the “Young America” branch of the Democrats, those full-throated expansionists and champions of a vitalistic nation of adventure and energy, argued that Cass was too old, too fat, and too stupid. Despite an admirable career of public service, Horace Greeley described the sixty-sixyear-old candidate in 1848 as “that pot-bellied, mutton-headed cucumber Cass.” Aside from Greeley’s vicious characterization, Cass’s losing the 1848 presidential race to Taylor marked him as a dubious candidate. The younger and smarter Stephen Douglas posed a more serious threat, but whereas Cass lacked in energy and charisma, Douglas was accused of suffering from too much of both. Indeed, Douglas’s chief drawback was the fact that he was too much of a backslapper, too much a man of the people. As Nevins describes these reservations, first paraphrasing and then quoting from a letter written by Andrew Johnson, Douglas’s “Young America” supporters “threw their arms about his neck on the street; they read complimentary pieces to him in oyster cellars and sent them off to subsidized sheets; they stood beside him in barrooms to laugh, drink, and discuss some swindling of the government. The whole concern were miserable banditti, ‘much fitter to occupy cells in the penitentiary than places of state.’” As Nevins puts it, Douglas’s “loose habits . . . ill-chosen associates; [and] his humble origin and self-made Western career excited the scorn of Eastern and Southern aristocrats.” Then as

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now, class, in both its economic and social senses, was a powerful factor in determining one’s political fortunes. In short, whereas New Hampshire’s Pierce was a graceful gentleman of the upper crust who embodied old world style and decorum, Illinois’s Douglas was a rough upstart from the frontier who demonstrated the West’s rowdy challenge to established class authority.11 At the Democratic Party convention in Baltimore, June 1–4, 1852, it took thirty-four rounds of balloting for Cass, Douglas, James Buchanan (who would get his turn in 1856), and William Marcy (who became Pierce’s secretary of state) to stymie each other so completely that Pierce could begin to get serious play as a compromise candidate. With the party heavies deadlocked in mutual animosity, “Young Hickory” began to look more and more suitable; he received fifteen votes on the thirty-fifth ballot and eventually won his party’s nomination on the forty-ninth. Pierce received his party’s nomination to be its presidential candidate, then, on the basis of five factors: (1) the party’s big names thwarted each other, leaving the door open for a dark horse candidate; (2) despite his relatively young age and thin record, Pierce possessed uncommon good looks and beguiling charm; (3) he had demonstrated unwavering support for all Democratic Party principles in general; (4) he had publicly stated his support for the Compromise of 1850 in particular; and (5) he was a constant and cantankerous critic of all FreeSoilers, abolitionists, and other extremists. Regarding this fifth attribute, Pierce’s hatred for “ultras” of all sorts was well documented. While in Congress he supported the Gag Rule; in New Hampshire he waged political war on anyone even loosely leaning toward abolition; and in 1848 he excoriated those party traitors whose position on slavery gave the presidency to the Whigs. Northern Democrats suffered internal dissension between “Barnburners,” those Democrats who were supposedly willing to “burn down the barn” of party unity for their free soil principles, and “Hunkers,” those Democrats willing to compromise on slavery to preserve party power. In 1848, enough Barnburners bolted to the Free Soil Party, which received 291,263 votes with Martin Van Buren as its candidate, to throw the presidency to the Whigs’ Zachary Taylor. Pierce was furious then and remained so for the rest of his life. While Pierce loathed both radical abolitionists and party-discipline-destroying Barnburners, he was nonetheless confronted, as were all northern Democrats throughout the antebellum period, with a daunting rhetorical task: he needed to prove to southerners that he would tolerate no interference with slavery while proving to northerners that he would place the Union’s needs above those of southern fire-eaters. Like so many of his peers, Pierce’s response to this dilemma of

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needing to satisfy dramatically different constituencies was to seek refuge in the rhetoric of vague constitutionalism. This was a popular strategy of assenting to broad claims of Union and Law and Democracy while eschewing any of the messy details that might lead to political bickering.12 Pierce employed vague constitutionalism in a speech in the fall of 1850, when he toasted “The Compromise Measures of 1850 and the New Hampshire Democracy: Upon the former, the latter have fixed the seal of their emphatic approbation.” Displaying the denial of political realities that would eventually lead to his undoing, Pierce then declared that there is “No North, no South, no East, no West, under the constitution”; rather, good Union men saw there an inviolable command to honor “a sacred maintenance of the common bond and true devotion to the common brotherhood.” There are two major problems with such platitudinous rhetoric. First, in portraying the Constitution as a metapolitical charter sanctifying devotion and brotherhood Pierce turns a political document into a religious document; this means that those who disagree with the party line are not simply political opponents but Union-jeopardizing heretics. This tendency to escalate contingent political arguments into transcendent theological violations led Pierce to make a series of grave errors in judgment, the worst of which, his 1856 farewell address, sent the nation into a tailspin, hurt his party badly, and destroyed his reputation as a statesman. The second major problem with the rhetoric of vague constitutionalism is that it invites confusion. For example, many northerners feared that in celebrating his “emphatic approbation” of the 1850 Compromise Pierce was subtly pointing toward his support for the expansion of slavery into new territories. But, those southern extremists who saw the Compromise as too limiting on the prospects of slavery, and therefore as a secretly abolitionist document, feared that in speaking of his “emphatic approbation” Pierce was covertly signaling his sly approval of Free Soilism. In short, by speaking of the nation’s most pressing political controversies in such vague terms, Pierce enabled various factions to read him in contrasting ways, thus inviting controversy regarding the intentions lurking beneath such generalities.13 For example, once Pierce was nominated in June 1852 as the Democrats’ candidate for the presidency, a circular appeared charging him with harboring abolitionist sentiments. The document bears no author or publisher information, yet we know that it was produced by one of the Whig’s leading strategists, Connecticut’s Truman Smith, who hoped to chip away at Pierce’s support in the South by tarring him with abolitionist sympathies. Entitled Franklin Pierce and His Abolitionist Allies, the document charged Pierce with

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being “the ringleader of all the fanaticism and agitation which has been going on in New England.” Adding even more color to this absurd accusation, Pierce was then described as “thoroughly imbued with anti-slavery sentiment and prejudice.” Beware, the document urged, for Pierce “will betray the South.” While these charges were patently, almost comically, false, the text nonetheless pointed to the danger of relying on the rhetoric of vague constitutionalism. For whereas Pierce’s broad and bland pronouncements could be misread by various political factions, some observers felt that his platitudinous generalities were in fact carefully crafted to mean different things to different sections. In this sense, Pierce’s vague constitutionalism was not so much a prudent attempt to avoid sectional controversy as a sneaky trick for producing rhetorically blank slates that invited regionally biased projections. Because his rhetoric was so vague, the argument went, anyone could read into him whatever they wanted to see, thus making him a chameleon attractive to all but repellent to none. Astutely recognizing the duplicity of this strategy, the pamphlet sneered that there was no need “to prove, not that you are an abolitionist, but that you are an insincere man; that you have . . . ‘two systems,’ one for New Hampshire and the other for Washington.” In short, “you are utterly unworthy of the confidence of honest men in any part of the country.”14 The Democrats responded to this irresponsible document with “Franklin Pierce and His Abolitionist Allies,” a brief pamphlet that put the Whigs’ original title in mocking quotation marks, thus casting doubts upon its accuracy. In contrast to the Whigs’ attempt to portray Pierce as an extremist, the Democrats planted him in the solid middle ground by again invoking his support for the Constitution: “Franklin Pierce is neither the hot-brained advocate of slavery, . . . nor does he abhor slavery and loathe the Fugitive-Slave Law. . . . He respects the compromises of the Constitution, and looks upon the Fugitive Slave Bill as one of the legitimate fruits of those compromises.” While such claims strive to echo the fence-sitting moderation of Clay and Webster and faction-fearing Whigs, referring to the Fugitive Slave Bill as the “fruit” of anything other than a deal with the devil incensed Free-Soilers and abolitionists, who, as we saw with Emerson, Whittier, Ward, and Loguen, saw the compromise as nothing short of the final buckling of democracy to the pressure of tyrannical slavemasters and even the Devil himself. Indeed, in a political cartoon entitled “Position of the Democratic Party in 1852” (see figure 3), Pierce kneels at the feet of a whip-holding slavemaster commanding him to “Save the Union” while Satan emerges from Hell, complete with pitchfork, horns, and a gleeful smile, to cheer “Well done my faithful

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Fig. 3. “Position of the Democratic Party in 1852” shows Pierce groveling beneath a whipwielding slavemaster who is encouraged by Senators Cass and Douglas and “the Devil come up to attend to his revival;” courtesy New Hampshire Historical Society.

servants!” An appalled Thomas Jefferson hovers above the scene, looking down from his perch in Heaven, from where he bemoans “Ye degenerate Sons!” The bottom of this biting image includes text that summarizes its visual argument: “the slaveocratic miscalled Democratic Party, how they obey the crack of the slaveholder’s Whip!” And in a line that foreshadows some of the infelicitous rhetoric that would get Pierce in hot water a few years later, “Young Hickory,” his face pressed to the ground in abject servility, proclaims “I accept this cheerfully.” Rendered in a satirical, even ridiculous mode, the image nonetheless conveys deep anger at the Democrats’ hijacking at the hands of slavery.15 The party response to such devilish lampooning of their man was The Abolitionists Attack! Abolitionists Against General Pierce. Less an attempt to refute the abolitionists’ charges than an offering of reassurance to moderates, the pamphlet restated Pierce’s position as a first-rate fence-sitter. Indeed, his commitment to the Union “forced him to discountenance the wicked purposes of fanaticism, and repel their assaults on the principles of the Constitution and the integrity of the Union.” It is important to observe here that the Constitution is not at all clear regarding the position of slavery in the Union:

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debating the fate of the peculiar institution in the new territories was therefore not a mischievous flight of radicalism so much as a crucial question too volatile to be avoided by any responsible politician. But by describing those who disagreed with Democratic Party principles as full of “wicked purposes” meant to imperil the “integrity of the Union,” Pierce’s handlers escalated both legitimate political differences of opinion and unavoidable questions of constitutional hermeneutics into nation-threatening acts of treason. In so doing, they produced a rhetoric as extreme as any produced by even William Lloyd Garrison—who also charged his opponents with threatening the Union—thus cutting off all hope of productive discourse on the very question that was haunting the nation.16 The absurdity of refusing to talk frankly about slavery was captured most poignantly (although apparently unintentionally) by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It was understood in the antebellum Unites States that presidential candidates did not campaign; rather, their parties campaigned for them. One popular tactic was to publish campaign biographies of the candidate. As life-long friends and schoolmates from their shared days at Bowdoin, Hawthorne was a logical choice to author such a campaign biography of Pierce. Along with standing as the most embarrassing work Hawthorne ever published, his Life of Franklin Pierce also included a telling description of the Democrats’ paralysis over slavery. “Merely human wisdom and human efforts cannot subvert” slavery, Hawthorne warned, “except by tearing to pieces the constitution, breaking the pledges which it sanctions, and severing into distracted fragments that common country which Providence brought into one nation.” Thus eschewing any sense of the possibility of wise political negotiation in favor of the escalatory and paralyzing charge that tackling the nation’s most pressing problem would inevitably destroy the Union, Hawthorne celebrated the fact that Pierce and the Democrats wisely “look upon slavery as one of those evils which divine Providence does not leave to be remedied by human contrivances, but which, in its own good time, by some means impossible to be anticipated, but of the simplest and easiest operation, when all its uses shall have been fulfilled, it causes to vanish like a dream.” In this classic example of the rhetoric of vague constitutionalism, a worst case scenario (civil war) is held up as a reason to defer all political controversy, while a transcendent and antipolitical Constitution is held up as the best safeguard against catastrophe until God miraculously decides to heal the nation’s wounds.17 From one perspective, then, Hawthorne and Pierce and the Democrats pursued the White House in 1852 armed with paradoxically wishful yet paralyzed thinking regarding the nation’s political dilemmas. But from the

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Democrats’ perspective, the dashing young Pierce was a sure bet; thus, in June, the Democratic Review anointed Pierce “the chosen son of the young democracy.” Complete with a dreamy drawing of Pierce opposite the article’s title page, “Eighteen Fifty-Two, and The ‘Coming Man’” captures the brash sense of entitlement that marks “Young America” rhetoric when it implores “the young generation of this century to take the command which is its rightful and indefeasible inheritance.” Ever the faithful party organ, the Review printed an extra 50,000 copies of each campaign edition, thus filling the summer and fall of 1852 with tributes to the Democrats’ handsome “chosen son.”18

third movement: pierce’s inaugural address and the rhetoric of cheerful politics Having expected to face one of the Democrats’ elder statesmen in the race for the presidency, most likely either Cass or Marcy or Buchanan, or even the younger Douglas, the Whigs happily responded to Pierce’s dark horse nomination with the belittling chant “Who’s Franklin Pierce?” Feeding off of unflattering stories regarding his less-than-heroic service in the Mexican War, Whigs mocked him as “the fainting General.” In a cheeky display of the uses of the new means of print technology to achieve ironic ends, Paul Boller reports that the Whigs distributed “with great glee a miniature book, only an inch high and a half inch wide, entitled The Military Service of General Pierce.” Linking these critiques of his war record with his well-known struggles with alcohol, Holt reports that “Whigs across the North joked that Pierce was ‘The Hero of Many a Well Fought Bottle.’” Despite these efforts to smear his character, Pierce won the election in what at first appears to be convincing fashion, as he amassed 254 Electoral College votes to the Whig’s Winfield Scott’s 42. But the popular vote reveals a much tighter race. Whereas Pierce polled 1,601,474 votes, Scott won 1,386,580, the Free Soil Party’s John Hale took 155,825, the dead Webster mysteriously received 7,425, and the fringe candidates Troup and Broome collectively earned 7,785. This means that of a total vote of 3,157,810 Pierce’s majority over his rivals was less than 50,000; in fact, Nichols observes that “in the free states . . . 14,000 more votes were cast against him than for him.” In short, whereas those opposed to Pierce split their votes among Scott, Hale, Webster, Troup, and Broome, Democratic Party discipline held together in enough states to win the election. The victory should be understood, then,

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not so much as a ringing endorsement of Pierce as a tribute to well-run machine politics. Clearly, Pierce and the Democrats won with little margin of error overall and in the North only due to the disorganization of their opponents. Furthermore, by the end of the campaign the Senate’s triumvirate of elder statesmen was no more, as Calhoun, Clay, and Webster had all passed away, thus leaving the Senate bereft of senior leadership. Franklin Pierce thus entered the White House as a narrowly elected doughface perched upon a perilous tightrope.19 Nonetheless, the South’s aristocratic gentlemen still ran the nation’s capital with great flair; they welcomed Pierce to Washington with lavish balls at which Nevins reports gliding teams of fancily clad slaves served “terrapin, roast turkey, lobster, and hothouse fruits of the finest quality and in overpowering quantity.” Pierce’s record as a doughface, his effortless interpersonal charm, his ease with the bottle, and his marked skills on the dance floor made him a natural star of such parties. Often found arm in arm at such events with his soon-to-be secretary of war, the South’s fiery champion of secession, Jefferson Davis, Pierce quickly proved that his earlier promises to defend the Fugitive Slave Law and states’ rights would hold true. Those Whigs, Free-Soilers, and abolitionists who feared that his ease of access to the glittering culture of Southern hauteur foreshadowed difficult times were not mistaken.20 Indeed, Pierce’s inaugural address, delivered on the afternoon of March 4, 1853, amid a melting snow, confirmed his standing as a dependable Jacksonian Democrat who would pursue the nation’s Manifest Destiny while wielding the Constitution as a contract protecting states’ rights and personal property, including that property held in the form of slaves. After dispensing with the necessary introductory niceties, Pierce’s first rhetorical task was to prove to “Young America” Democrats and other ardent expansionists that his presidency would continue America’s march to meet its Manifest Destiny. “It is not to be disguised,” Pierce began, using a Melvillian double negation that marks much of his language, “that our attitude as a nation and our position on the globe render the acquisition of certain possessions not within our jurisdiction eminently important for our protection.” Slavemasters would have understood that these lines signaled Pierce’s intention to pursue Cuba, then considered the likely next destination for expanding slavery. Many Whigs had strongly opposed annexing Texas and precipitating war with Mexico, both of which they perceived as shameful excuses for providing slavery with new territory. Talk of grabbing Cuba, even in such veiled terms, could only exacerbate such tensions. Thus, in order not to aggravate Whigs and others opposed to

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filibustering and military adventurism, Pierce balanced his pledge to pursue “certain possessions” with the claim that “We have nothing in our history or position to invite aggression; we have everything to beckon us to the cultivation of relations of peace and amity with all nations.” In a move that illustrates how fully Americans believed their Manifest Destiny was foreordained by the inevitable pull of modernity itself, Pierce concluded this line of thought with the pledge that “your future is boundless. Its obligations throng the unexplored pathway of advancement, and will be limitless as duration.” Echoing Hawthorne’s hope that slavery would “vanish like a dream” from the United States only after God’s miraculous intervention, Pierce argued that “the acquisition of certain possessions not within our jurisdiction” will proceed not through warlike aggrandizement but through the benevolent workings of history itself, through the metapolitical pull of “boundless” and “limitless” opportunities. By masking the causes and effects of these “acquisitions”—who will make them happen and how and at what cost?—Pierce enabled slave-masters to read between the lines and imagine a course of unfettered expansion while denying the opponents of such views any concrete evidence with which to build a counterargument. Thus, much like the rhetoric of vague constitutionalism, such passages sought to please everyone while offending no one.21 Pierce’s second rhetorical task was to reassure Democrats that his presidency would maintain a minimalist approach to questions of power. Ever since Jefferson’s canonical 1800 Kentucky Resolutions attacking the centralization of powers pursued by Adams and the Federalists, Democrats had argued for a states’ rights version of democracy in which the federal government’s powers were strictly limited. For Pierce’s generation of Democrats, the touchstone event in this tradition was Jackson’s 1830 veto of the Maysville Road Bill. In his campaign biography, Hawthorne explained Pierce’s commitment to this Jeffersonian-Jacksonian lineage by summarizing the fears that drove Jackson’s famous veto: “This bill was part of a system of vast public works, principally railroads and canals, which it was proposed to undertake at the expense of the national treasury. . . . The estimate of works undertaken, or projected, . . . amounted to considerably more than a hundred millions of dollars. The expenditure of this enormous sum, and doubtless of other incalculable amounts, in progressive increase, was to be for purposes often of unascertained utility, and was to pass through the agents and officers of the federal government—a means of political corruption not safely to be trusted even in the purest hands.”22

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Hawthorne thus argued that the infrastructure of modernity—its multiplying roads, canals, banks, insurance companies, “vast public works,” and so on—amounted to a giant (and apparently irresistible!) invitation to corruption. If such antimodern and anticapitalist thought was pushed to its most extreme consequences, then the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian tradition could be understood as sanctioning a paralyzing refusal to use power for productive, enabling purposes. As described by Rush Welter, this fear of the abuse of power was so deeply ingrained in antebellum Democrats that they cast “opprobrium on the whole range of activities traditionally associated with governing. In effect, they denied the legitimacy of governing even under democratic auspices.” This denial of the legitimacy of governing was less a political truth to be obeyed at all costs than a rhetorical weapon to be wielded against anyone who proposed policies opposed by Democrats. Nonetheless, antebellum Democrats were expected at the least to invoke such principles, regardless of whether they governed according to them.23 “Young Hickory” was clearly an astute student of this Jacksonian rhetorical tradition, for while he avoided any discussion of specific ventures, he reassured his listeners that his administration would be marked by “an observance of rigid economy.” Using this most political of occasions to argue that the politics of governing was beyond debate, Pierce argued that “The dangers of concentration of all power in the general government of a confederacy so vast as ours are too obvious to be disregarded.” Speaking against the “concentration of all power” would have been understood by southern states’ rights men not only as a necessary nod to Jeffersonian and Jacksonian economic, political, and rhetorical traditions, but more importantly as a promise that the federal government would make no moves hostile to slavery. Indeed, just as slavery was protected in the Constitution, where it was defined as an institution to be governed by each state, so Pierce promised to maintain policies shaped by “the exercise of powers [as] clearly granted by the Constitution.” The problem with such claims is that the Constitution’s distribution of powers and authorities is anything but “clearly granted”; instead, the document requires intricate political reasoning—it must be read, interpreted, and manipulated according to specific exigencies. By denying this central fact of U.S. political life, and by beginning his presidency instead with the argument that Democratic Party dogma was “too obvious to be disregarded” and that the distribution of powers in the federal government was too obvious to merit debate, Pierce signaled to his audience that his would be an administration of classically Jacksonian antipolitical politics—Pierce would govern without governing,

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he would hold power without using it, thus leaving the liberty of the states untrammeled.24 One of the paradoxes of Jacksonian Democrats, however, was that while they lived in fear of the corruption that supposedly followed inevitably from the concentration of power in a strong federal government, they nonetheless never hesitated to use the federal government to advance the cause of slavery. Passing a gag rule against abolitionists (1836), annexing Texas (fought for in 1844 and approved in 1845), waging war against Mexico (1846–48), and legislating the return of fugitive slaves (1850), were all examples of this paradox of antifederal states’ rights forces using federal power to protect states’ rights regarding slavery. In the penultimate paragraph of his inaugural address, Pierce illustrated precisely how a good Jacksonian Democrat could talk about a minimalist, hands-off government at one moment while turning in the next to the use of political power for the most crass of party purposes. “The field of calm and free discussion in our country is open, and will always be so,” Pierce promised, “but never has been and never can be traversed for good in a spirit of sectionalism and uncharitableness.” Understanding “sectionalism and uncharitableness” as euphemisms for anyone opposed either to slavery or its extension into new lands, Pierce’s apparently strong defense of free speech concluded with the threat that opposing Democratic Party dogma would not be tolerated.25 Indeed, whereas Pierce portrayed the Democrats and their policies as honorable and pro-Union, anyone holding dissenting views was characterized as suffering from “feverish ambition” or “morbid enthusiasm,” which were both “calculated to dissolve the bonds of law and affection which unite us.” Against such heresies Pierce promised, “I shall interpose a ready and stern resistance.” In this regard Pierce’s position was typical of most Americans, who feared extremism and favored law and order at almost any cost. But Pierce’s hauteur was boundless, so rather than staking out the prudent middle course he had been elected to uphold, he instead demanded not only humble obedience to the law but enthusiastic support for it. The Fugitive Slave Law, then, the law that lit much of the North on fire, the law that struck millions of northerners as a cruel extension of slavery into free soil, “should be respected and obeyed, not with a reluctance encouraged by abstract opinions . . . but cheerfully and according to the decisions” of Congress. Cheerfully! This ill-crafted sentence fell upon northern ears like a bolt of audacity, for being told to smile while catching runaway slaves could only have been understood as a galling insult. Despite his careful invocation of the Jacksonian mantra of avoiding centralized power in the first parts of

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his inaugural, Pierce thus ended the speech not only by demonstrating a commitment to use federal power to support slavery and to make northern opponents of the Law swallow proslavery policies cheerfully, with a smile, but also with the threat that opponents of such obligatory assent would be construed as “fanatical.” Pierce’s inaugural amounts, then, to a chilling act of foreshadowing, for even here, before any of the major crises of his presidency would erupt, the young president is flattening the myriad shades of political difference into warring extremes, in this case into honorable Democrats and Union-threatening fanatics.26 Pierce’s first year in office passed relatively quietly. His first annual message, delivered to Congress on December 5, 1853, amounted to a longer and more elaborate version of his inaugural address. Whereas modern presidents deliver the State of the Union Address before a joint session of Congress, all of Pierce’s annual messages, as was the custom of the day, were recited in the Senate by his secretary, Sidney Webster. On the one hand, one can imagine presidents who were poor public speakers feeling grateful for this respite from the difficult task of addressing potentially hostile legislators (and surely the distance between absent author and gathered audience was meant to enforce a sense of regality, of an authority so great that it need not be present to command attention); on the other hand, one can imagine presidents who were good public speakers, such as Pierce, lamenting the inability to spin an address via the subtle nonverbal and interpersonal charms possessed by those blessed with the gift of performance. For my purposes below, then, it is important to note that my readings are not of speeches per se, for there is no record regarding the power or lack thereof of Webster’s delivery, but of the reproduced texts of speeches. Pierce’s first annual message contained two remarkable features. First, even while repeating the standard party line regarding the need for a minimalist government of limited powers, Pierce’s report on the government’s various activities illustrated that it was quickly becoming a bureaucracy of immense proportions. The Treasury balance for the year was $14,632,136; the national debt, following a payment of $12,703,329, stood at $56,486,708; the Post Office Department had expended $7,982,756 and taken in $5,942,734, thus leaving an operating loss of $2,042,032; the Pension Bureau was in turmoil; and the secretary of the interior reported that 9,819,411 new acres of frontier land had been surveyed, of which 266,042 warrants had accounted for the sale of 1,609,919 acres, totaling $53,289,465 worth of land. To postmodern readers familiar with government budgets calculated in trillions of dollars these may seem like paltry figures; nonetheless, they indicate that

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what Hawthorne and Jackson had feared as the “means of political corruption” were unmistakably present. In short, while speaking of his administration in strictly Jacksonian terms, Pierce was managing a federal government of rapidly increasing size and power—his rhetoric of Jacksonian minimalism and the reality of managing a rising leviathan therefore stood in stark contradiction.27 The second passage of note in Pierce’s first annual message follows logically from this contradiction between his commitment to a small, hands-off government and the logistical realities of managing an empire. That is, while his message illustrated a nation swelling into a modernized and fully capitalist empire of continental proportions, Pierce hoped this growth would happen happily, without political conflict. But by refusing to use federal power to settle these new lands—all 1.6 million acres of them—by holding to the Jacksonian line that power is well used when not used, he (and his Democratic predecessors) left settlers and adventurers to fend for themselves, hence creating cauldrons of tension regarding the expansion of slavery, the construction of railroads, the incorporation of banks, and the building of other necessary institutions in new lands. Pierce’s only response to these pressing political problems was to avoid politics in favor of the language of gentlemanly decorum. “[T]he duty becomes yearly stronger and clearer upon us,” Pierce observed, “to cultivate a fraternal and affectionate spirit, language, and conduct in regard to other States and in relation to the varied interests, institutions, and habits of sentiment and opinion which may respectively characterize them.” Pierce’s answer to the problems attendant upon America’s rise to modernity was to ask everyone to just get along, to be “fraternal and affectionate” gentlemen. This antipolitical rhetoric of cheerful politics amounts to a form of elegant paralysis, to a display of disdain for the messy power-brokering and deal-making required to solve political problems. As he put it in his second annual message, delivered December 4, 1854, the Union’s safety depended not so much on wise statecraft led by a strong federal government as on citizens putting aside their political differences “to render cheerful obedience to the laws of the land.” These passages illustrate a president incapable of thinking presidentially; they reveal a man so overmatched by circumstances that his only response is to recite the Treasury figures, review accepted policies, and depart with the naive request to play nice—there is nothing in these passages to hint at leadership, vision, or any of the other grand gestures that mark bold presidential rhetoric.28

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fourth movement: pierce’s veto of “miss dix’s bill” and “the beginning of the end” While Pierce frowned upon those ruffians and loudmouths who transgressed his sense of democracy as a polite conversation between elite gentlemen, the nation exploded in one of its most sustained and truly remarkable periods of often raucous debate about radical activism and social reform. Temperance activists sought to cleanse the nation of the deleterious effects of demon rum; evangelists of dozens of varieties struggled to save the souls of the lost; abolitionists fought to end slavery; suffragists worked to bring women the vote; anti-death penalty activists argued against execution; penologists tried to reduce crime and make prisons less brutal; unions and workers’ leagues sought to make capitalism less predatory—on and on it went, in a dizzying tribute to the belief that humanity was perfectible. Indeed, to an extent that I find both heartening and challenging, these antebellum reformers believed that democracy granted them not only the right but the obligation to participate in reforming their society. Regardless of their desired goals, all of these movements tried to persuade the public via speeches, broadsides, pamphlets, books, marches, petitions to Congress, letters to newspapers and magazines, songs in churches and songs at rallies and songs in the home, street theater and staged plays, and poems of all shapes and sizes. Change was in the air; no scheme was too utopian; no hope was too zany. This sense of the openness of democratic life to improvement is captured in the prayerlike dedication to Horace Greeley’s 1850 Hints Toward Reforms, a popular collection of his Lyceum speeches, which is offered “To THE GENEROUS, THE HOPEFUL, THE LOVING, who, Firmly and Joyfully Believing in the Impartial and Boundless Goodness of Our Father, TRUST that the Errors, the Crimes, and the Miseries, which have Long Rendered Earth a Hell, shall yet be Swallowed Up and Forgotten, in a Far Exceeding and Unmeasured Reign of TRUTH, PURITY, AND BLISS.”29 Greeley and his fellow activists’ utopian hopes faced off squarely against the realities of modern capitalism and what David Potter has characterized as “the riptide of immigration.” The former ground workers down in grueling days of hard labor, schooled the masses in new means of bodily discipline, and undercut local cultures and their pre-modern forms of exchange; the latter flooded America’s eastern cities with so many bodies—2.9 million European immigrants landed in the United States between 1845 and 1854, amounting to 14.5 percent of the population—that capitalists could cut wages even further, thus creating the first urban ghettoes teeming with the working poor.

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New York essayist George Foster sneered that such neighborhoods amounted to a “university of dissipation” in which the downtrodden were taught that modern capitalism was little more than thievery, “the sublime of mercantile swindling.” In a brutal 1850 essay depicting morning breaking across New York City, Foster chronicled the drunken, the stupid, the splattered, the “human swine” who littered the gutters and slept fitfully on “sticky and oozy benches.” These “wretched and ragged loafers,” disproportionately drawn from new immigrants, were the waste products of the new “dreary and desolate reality” of urban capitalism. By 1853, the first year of Pierce’s presidency, Foster had become so disgusted with this new “reality” that he wrote a blistering essay describing “Wall Street and the Merchants’ Exchange,” in which he wondered, “Would not a rational being, stationed here for the first time, and knowing nothing of the great game of money-making which absorbs the faculties of the current age—would he not conclude that some gigantic lunatic asylum had been let loose, and that its inmates were rushing about in disgust with their newly-found freedom?”30 Portraying Wall Street as a circus of lunatics would have rung familiar with readers who by Pierce’s presidency would likely have devoured any number of the popular sensational novels or exposés portraying what many observers believed was a rising tide of insanity. Criminals in particular were increasingly thought of not so much as the desperate byproducts of capitalism as beings of inferior and damaged quality. Less a commentary on God’s wrath or a sad reflection on the brutality of their society, the criminally insane were increasingly thought of as ontologically depraved subhumans, as representatives of an extreme and irreconcilable otherness. “The most important ideological work done by this new construction,” Karen Halttunen argues, “was to protect the understanding of human nature as rational and wellintentioned, by creating a kind of moral quarantine to contain the agents of the most shocking of human transgressions.” On the other hand, many lateantebellum Americans believed that their generation’s unprecedented rise in crime and insanity was the result of a world gone horribly awry. For example, William Sweetser argued in his 1850 Mental Hygiene that “the demon of unrest, the luckless offspring of ambition, haunts us all . . . racking us with the constant and wearing anxiety of what we call bettering our condition.” For Sweetser and his fellow medical experts, including Isaac Ray, Thomas Kirkbride, Amariah Brigham, and Edward Jarvis, insanity was the result of this “demon of unrest.”31 While Foster railed against the cruelties of this new culture of ambition and greed, and while Whitman responded sweetly with the command to

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“give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy,” social reformers sought to shelter the insane from the “great game of money-making” by building elaborate asylums in which medical professionals offered routine, quiet, counseling, and, hopefully, peace of mind. Along with Ray, Brigham, Kirkbride, and Jarvis, one of the leading proponents of building asylums for the insane was Dorothea Dix. A tireless activist, Dix was among antebellum America’s most respected advocates for the reform of both prisons and asylums. Among her many triumphs was shepherding toward completion the New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum, depicted here in Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion (see figure 4) in a naturalistic yet melancholy style that indicates how reformers saw asylums as serene places of retreat, balance, and introspection, all framed by symmetrical architecture and perfectly manicured lawns. After first submitting a bill to Congress in 1848, and after working the corridors of power for six long years, Dix managed in 1854 to steer through Congress a bill that would have ordered the federal government to release ten million acres of land to the states, with the land apportioned according to each state’s population. The states could then sell the land, invest the profit in “safe stocks,” and so accumulate enough capital to build asylums for the insane. Despite the grandeur of the New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum (and there were a handful of others like it), then as now the

Fig. 4. This etching of the New Jersey Lunatic Asylum—symmetrical and melancholy, a quiet and magisterial retreat for healing—appeared in Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion in June 1852: courtesy Rare Book and Special Collections, Library of the University of Illinois.

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insane were low on most states’ list of priorities, meaning that asylums (like prisons) were often little more than miserable dungeons. Known respectfully in Washington as “Miss Dix’s Bill,” the proposal sought to tackle this shameful situation by using federal and state power to encourage much-needed social reform.32 When Dix and Pierce met to discuss the bill on December 7, 1853, Pierce was reported as having claimed that “it had his warmest sympathies”; when the bill passed the Senate on March 8 and the House on April 19, Dix and her supporters thus expected Pierce would sign the bill into law. His veto of the bill therefore struck many observers not only as an unfortunate political decision but as yet another indication of how his evasive rhetoric enabled him to wiggle one way and then to wiggle another, without ever leaving himself in anything as unseemly as a lie, for while Pierce had expressed his “sympathies” he had not promised to sign the bill. In fact, his veto message of May 3, 1854, offers not only the most extended discourse on Jacksonian political theory in his entire oeuvre but an indictment of the activist-oriented assumptions that lie behind the bill. While William Seward lamented in the Senate that Pierce’s veto was “desultory, illogical, and confused,” the veto merits close attention because it offers one of the most detailed exhibits of the rhetorical and political complexities of Pierce’s presidency.33 The veto opens with another example of Pierce’s struggles with direct language, as he introduces his response to the bill not as a veto, as a negation, but as a “statement of the objections which have required me to withhold from it my approval.” After asking for the full consideration of “those whose good opinion I so highly value,” meaning the senators and congressmen whose work he is about to reject, and after reviewing the logistics of the bill, Pierce then explains his veto. In a statement that illustrates the paralyzing slippery slope logic driving Jacksonian dogma regarding the implied abuse of power, Pierce argues that “It can not be questioned that if Congress has power to make provisions for the indigent insane . . . [then] it has the same power to provide for the indigent who are not insane, and thus to transfer to the Federal Government the charge of all the poor in all the States.” Thus, whereas the bill before him proposes a specific and narrowly defined program of federal land grants to help states care for their indigent insane, Pierce vetoes the bill because of its possible implications as a precedent for shackling the federal government with the responsibility of caring for all indigent persons. His veto therefore hinges on four rhetorical maneuvers. First, it switches the burden of responsibility of caring for the indigent insane from states, as clearly proposed in the bill, to the federal government,

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as imagined by Pierce. Second, it turns a specific proposal requiring detailed political actions into a sweeping statement implying broad governing principles. Whereas the former is the pragmatic stuff of politics and may thus be overturned or modified at some later date, the latter amounts to Holy Writ which may not be transgressed. Third, it expands the target of the legislation’s proposed reforms from the relatively small population of the indigent insane to the limitless realm of all indigent persons, including the poor, the sick, the lame, the orphan, and so on. Fourth, it temporally shifts the status of the bill from a concrete act of legislation responding to social problems in the present into an imagined invitation for implied claims on federal powers in the future. The combination of these four rhetorical maneuvers creates a paralyzing slippery slope in which any form of federal action stands as an invitation to all forms of abuse.34 The result of this rhetorical process of extrapolating a worst case scenario based on implied abuses is illustrated in Pierce’s next sentence, which warns that if the bill is approved, then it will demonstrate that the Federal government “has the same power to provide hospitals and other local establishments for the care and cure of every species of human infirmity, and thus to assume all that duty of either public philanthropy or public necessity to the dependent, the orphan, the sick, or the needy which is now discharged by the States themselves. . . . The whole field of public beneficence [will be] thrown open to the care and culture of the Federal Government.” But the bill does not propose any of these actions; and certainly the other Jacksonians in Washington would balk at any such interpretation of the bill, meaning that for Pierce’s nightmare scenario to be realized good Democrats would have to lose their senses, forget their most cherished principles, and inexplicably become utopian schemers dreaming of “public beneficence.” Pierce’s imagined ruining of Jacksonian principles therefore hinges in large part on his blinding hauteur, on his sense that he was required to defend the party’s core values from the hair-brained plots of deluded dreamers and even fellow Democrats cowardly bowing before public pressure. Apparently one of the few men in Washington capable of peering through the bill’s Whiggish assumptions to discern its debilitating implications, Pierce understood the bill as nothing less than a blank check for eclipsing individual responsibility by a corruption-riddled leviathan.35 Pierce may also have had personal axes to grind. When the bill was first introduced into Congress in 1848, one of its most vocal champions was Senator John P. Hale, Pierce’s life-long New Hampshire nemesis and one of the leading free soil spokesmen. One possible explanation for his veto is that

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Pierce sought to curtail the influence of his oldest enemy by vetoing his enemy’s pet legislation. In stymieing Hale, Pierce would also have thwarted the hopes of John Adams Dix (no relation to Dorothea Dix), the New York senator who first introduced Dix’s bill to Congress on June 27, 1848. J. A. Dix was on Pierce’s blacklist because he had been one of the leading Barnburners supporting Van Buren’s renegade Free Soil run for the presidency in 1848, thus enabling the Whigs to win the White House. Thus, while Pierce may have expressed “his warmest sympathies” to Dorothea Dix, her Washington supporters were men Pierce loved to hate—old debts would be paid, then, by vetoing “Miss Dix’s Bill.”36 But we should not overemphasize these interpersonal grudges, for it is clear that Pierce was unable to see the bill in any light other than that provided by the Jacksonian theology of states’ rights. As noted earlier, the states’ rights assumptions underlying Pierce’s thinking were based on the JeffersonianJacksonian tradition of demanding a strict literalism regarding the distribution of powers in the Constitution. Pierce’s veto restates these principles in strong terms, beginning with his charge that the proposed powers elaborated in the bill amount to a gross violation of the Constitution, for “No one of the enumerated powers touches the subject or has even a remote analogy to it.” Fully aware of the fact that the Whigs and the Federalists before them had often used the “general welfare” clause of the Constitution (Article I, Section 8) as an excuse for an activist federal agenda, Pierce counters that “I shall not discuss at length the question of the power sometimes claimed for the General Government under the clause of the eighth section of the Constitution, . . . because if it has not already been settled upon sound reason and authority it never will be.” Thus Pierce again illustrates his sense of governing not as the pragmatic handling of issues as they arise in their own specific context but as the righteous upholding of principles already settled in the past. Demonstrating the mischief produced by falling into false dichotomies, Pierce argues that either the world is governed by Jacksonian “sound reason” or it “never will be”—meaning that one is either a good Democrat or a would-be tyrant, either an upholder of republican tradition or a centralizing force of well-nigh monarchical pretensions.37 Connecticut’s Senator Isaac Toucey made the ghost haunting such fears explicit in a speech defending Pierce’s veto. While the senator agreed that Dix’s bill amounted to “rash and inconsiderate legislation,” his more pressing concern, like Pierce’s, was that if it had passed, then the bill would have offered a precedent for an expansive rendering of the federal government’s implied powers. “If any one maintains any such doctrine,” Toucey warned, “he

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goes to the utmost verge of high Federal power ever advocated or thought of in the worst times of the Republic.” The rest of the paragraph makes it clear that Toucey is alluding to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the dread beasts that it took Jefferson’s election in 1800 to slay, and the Whig’s plan of “internal improvements,” the corrupting project that it took Jackson’s veto of 1832 to torpedo. Thus rising to his president’s defense, Toucey portrays Pierce’s 1854 veto as the latest installment in a proud state’s rights tradition highlighted by the party’s two megastars, Jefferson and Jackson. In an essay that I suspect captured the sense of exasperation many Democrats felt regarding efforts such as Miss Dix’s Bill to expand the federal government’s powers, The United States Review (formerly the Democratic Review) confessed that “to us it seems almost impossible to misunderstand the provisions of the Constitution, nor do we comprehend how sensible men can so radically differ in their application, except when warped by passion, prejudice and interest.” And so Toucey and the Review, following Pierce’s lead, portray the benevolent activism driving Miss Dix’s Bill as but the latest deranged installment of that dubious Federalist and Whig tradition in which an overreaching federal government tries to trample states’ rights.38 In contrast to those passion- and prejudice-driven opportunists who see politics as the art of the possible in the present, Pierce swore in his veto that “I take the received and just construction of that article” (meaning Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution). The tendency of such thinking to slide into righteous paralysis was lambasted by Melville, who had one of the mysterious characters in his Confidence-Man quip “when one is confident he has truth on his side, and that it is not on the other, it is no very easy thing to be charitable; . . . for charity would beget toleration, you know, which is a kind of implied permitting, and in effect a kind of countenancing; and that which is countenanced is so far furthered.” While Melville thus poked merciless fun at the slippery slope underlying the president’s (and Toucey and the Review’s) slippery slope, the historical record regarding Pierce’s argument was less than supportive of his fears, for the federal government had previously made land grants to the Illinois Central Railroad, to veterans of various wars, to both Connecticut and Kentucky for institutions for deaf-mutes, to many states for educational purposes, and to settlers in the Oregon territory—all without compromising state’s rights or tarnishing the Constitution. Senator Archibald Dixon of Kentucky thus snarled that Pierce’s logic amounted to “upholding the rights of the States with a vengeance.”39 In fact, Pierce was clearly cognizant of the relevance of Dixon’s and others’ arguments, and thus of the fact that the Jacksonian “received and just

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construction” of the Constitution was under heavy fire, which perhaps explains his moving in the final part of his veto message from the rhetorical mode of justifying his decision to the more ominous tactic of threatening destruction. To suppose the strict Jeffersonian and Jacksonian reading of the Constitution “susceptible of any other construction,” Pierce warns, “would be to consign all the rights of the States and of the people of the States to the mere discretion of Congress, and thus to clothe the Federal Government with authority to control the sovereign States.” Such a move, Pierce intones, would be nothing less than “the beginning of the end.” Had Pierce been more attentive to public opinion, however, he would have known that “the beginning of the end” would come much sooner than he thought, for less than three weeks after signing his veto, the House passed Senator Stephen Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act (the Senate had passed it on March 4), thus sending to Pierce’s desk a bill that would unleash the most severe crisis of his presidency. In fact, Pierce may well have vetoed Dix’s bill as a means of signaling his support for the hands-off principles behind Douglas’s controversial legislation, for as Thomas Brown has argued, many Jacksonian Democrats believed that “Unrestricted congressional authority to control the public domain implied power to regulate slavery in the territories.” Pierce therefore could not support Dix’s bill, which called for an activist federal government with the authority to control public lands, without contradicting the principles driving the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which was based on the notion of irrevocable states’ rights—especially slavery—existing free from all federal intervention. Hence, behind the veto of Dix’s attempt to appropriate national lands one finds slavery lurking as the ever-present force driving antebellum politics. But whereas Pierce’s invocation of strict Jacksonian principles in the case of the indigent insane bill was an unfortunate yet telling application of outdated party dogma that fortunately bore little immediate result, his handling of the Kansas-Nebraska crisis would set the nation on a crash course with Civil War.40

fifth movement: the kansas-nebraska act and the “imagination of grievance” Historians have argued for generations over why Stephen Douglas pushed the Kansas-Nebraska Act through Congress in the winter and spring of 1854: was it a ploy to bind southern support for his expected run for the presidency in 1856? Was it part of a deal on expected railroad routes to the Pacific? Was

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it meant to instigate a sectional argument that would rip apart the already fractured Whig Party? For the sake of brevity I will address neither these questions nor the other political intrigues surrounding the bill; instead, I will pick up the narrative as Pierce signs the bill into law on May 24, 1854. I cannot help but begin with James Ford Rhodes’s 1892 claim that “Never in the United States . . . had a bad cause been more splendidly advocated; never more effectively was the worse made to appear the better reason.” Rhodes is speaking here of Douglas, but Pierce also not only supported this “bad cause,” he championed it. In fact, the Democratic Party mouthpiece, the Washington Union, declared in May of 1854 that support for the bill was viewed by Pierce as “a test of democratic orthodoxy.” Recognizing the danger of dogmatic line-drawing over such controversial legislation, Pierce’s secretary of state, William Marcy, would later moan that “the Nebraska question has sadly shattered our party in all the free states.” This would be Pierce’s legacy: presiding over making the worse appear the better reason, and thus shattering the Democratic Party in the North.41 To appreciate fully why the Kansas-Nebraska Act launched such a firestorm of controversy, consider this narrative of expanding slavery. With the 1820 Missouri Compromise, Missouri was admitted as a slave state and slavery was barred from all remaining territories in the Louisiana Purchase north of 36°30'. Then, as part of the 1850 Compromise, California was admitted as a free state, the free territories from 1820 (including what by then had become the states of Wisconsin and Iowa, the territories of Minnesota and Oregon, and the vast unsettled lands in between them) were maintained free of slavery, and the new lands wrenched from Mexico (including the giant Utah and New Mexico Territories) were slotted as territories where slavery would be decided by “popular sovereignty,” meaning by the settlers who migrate to the new lands, not by the federal government. There was much debate about the viability of slavery in these territories, yet proslavery forces assumed that these new lands would be settled primarily by southerners and that the popular will would render them slave states. As discussed above via the fiery outbursts of Emerson, Whittier, Loguen, and Ward, the 1850 Compromise also offered proslavery forces a toughened Fugitive Slave Law. Then, Douglas’s and Pierce’s 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, by ruling that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, opened much of the land previously protected from slavery in the 1820 and 1850 agreements to the rule of “popular sovereignty.” While no one expected slavery to flourish in the northern Rockies or high plains (meaning Nebraska was considered likely to become a free state), slavery was well established along the Missouri

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River and therefore was thought to be viable for Kansas. Thus, slavery, and the possibility of slavery, was spreading with lockstep consistency into new lands; many northerners therefore saw the Kansas-Nebraska Act as the latest attack in an ongoing assault on free soil. As Michael Holt summarizes the northern response, “The overthrow of the Missouri Compromise seemed like concrete evidence of a genuine Slave Power conspiracy.” In fact, when the bill passed the House on May 22, 1854, by a vote of 113 to 100, seething northerners calculated that as many as nineteen southerners supporting the bill were sitting in the House only because of the much-loathed, proslavery, representational jerry-rigging known as the three-fifths clause. Historically minded northerners pointed, then, to a democracy-destroying, proslavery conspiracy stretching from the first debates over the Constitution in 1787 up to the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. They thus saw the Kansas-Nebraska Act as yet another vile proslavery charter rammed through a slavery-based House and signed into law by a doughface president. As Samuel Johnson observed, “Had the administration deliberately set about to build up a powerful opposition, it could not have pursued a more fitting course than the one it followed.”42 Two tension-causing ambiguities in the bill concerned when and how locals, expressing their “popular sovereignty,” would decide whether the new lands would be free or slave soil. Was the question to be decided by state constitutions ratified upon states being admitted into the Union? Or was it to be decided by territorial legislatures convened prior to formal statehood? Both questions pointed to the fact that the fate of Kansas was essentially reduced to a foot race: whichever side could flood the territory with more settlers was most likely to control the territorial and then the state legislature, thus controlling the fate of slavery. Proslavery forces were led by Missourians, who perceived the possibility of free soil just across the Missouri River as a deadly threat to their way of life. As William Freehling has shown, slavery in Missouri was strongest along the rich farm lands paralleling the Missouri River, which entered in the northwest corner of the state and crossed over to just above St. Louis, where it joined the Mississippi River. Aside from this river-fueled corridor of slavery, the state’s relationship to the peculiar institution was already shaky. In St. Louis, where its 2,500 slaves had constituted 20 percent of the city’s population in 1830, so many white immigrants moved west that slaves accounted for but 3.4 percent of the population in 1850 and less than 1 percent by 1860. Thomas Hart Benton (nicknamed Big Bully) and his followers thus foresaw Missouri evolving along the lines of other border states, slowly but surely advancing toward modern capitalism fueled

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by white immigrants. Benton’s archenemy, David Atchison (nicknamed Bourbon Dave) and his followers understood that such developments would destroy slavery. Atchison and his allies thus sought to protect slavery in Missouri by taking control of Kansas, by force if necessary.43 Anti-Kansas-Nebraska bill forces in the North responded by forming the New York State Kansas Committee, the Wisconsin State Kansas Emigrant Aid Society, the Boston Kansas Relief Committee, the Emigration Aid Society of Northern Ohio, the Central Illinois Kansas Committee, and dozens of other organizations, from every state in the North, all committed to sending free soil emigrants to Kansas. Those groups that could not send emigrants sent rifles, blankets, food, and clothing; some of them sent the money necessary for building mills or schools or churches. While Atchison and his proslavery forces portrayed the northern emigrants as radical abolitionists, Eugene Berwanger has shown that in fact “the vast majority” of northern settlers “were generally unconcerned about the moral correctness of slavery.” In fact, when the Free State movement met in Topeka in 1855 to author its constitution it included a resolution “demanding the exclusion of all Negroes” from the territory. While southern emigrants saw themselves engaged in a dire political battle to preserve their way of life, including slavery, most northern emigrants saw themselves as simply doing what settlers had always done: heading west looking for good land, new opportunities, and fresh starts free from racial outsiders—hardly the goals of abolitionists. Nonetheless, Atchison and his supporters believed that the only way to preserve slavery in Missouri was to control the Kansas territorial legislature, even if that meant stealing elections. Thus, while the Kansas-Nebraska Bill forced the nation into yet another debate about slavery, the troubles in Kansas would result from extremist southerners hoping to extend slavery into the new territory by preventing supposed abolitionists from assuming any role in local political institutions.44 Indeed, when it was announced that the territory would elect a delegate to Congress in November 1854, proslavery Missourians, many armed to the teeth, flooded into the state to stuff ballot boxes and intimidate free-soilers. The proslavery John Winfield was elected, but of the 2,871 votes cast it was determined that only 1,114 were legal votes; the other 1,757 votes had been cast illegally by men referred to by free-soilers as “Border Ruffians.” Despite this obvious hijacking of the democratic process, Pierce encouraged his party’s leaders in Congress to recognize Winfield as the territory’s legitimate delegate. The territory’s first general election, held March 30, 1855, was equally problematic: 5,427 votes were cast for proslavery representatives and 791

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were given to free-soil candidates, but it was again discovered that 4,908 of the proslavery votes had been cast illegally by border-hopping Missourians. Governor Reeder, appointed by Pierce, was so shocked by these events and so intimidated by gun-toting Border Ruffians that he immediately departed for Washington to consult with Pierce. The two men met in the White House on successive afternoons in April to discuss the crisis—Pierce did nothing. By thus acknowledging the fraudulent legislature as legitimate Pierce signaled his support for the proslavery forces in Kansas, now entrenched in Shawnee, where they wrote a territorial constitution that made a mockery of democracy, including the provision that only slave-holders could sit in the new legislature. Believing the federal government supported the rigged elections, and seeing no recourse with the law, free-soilers convened their own anti-Shawnee state convention on September 5, 1855. To prove that they were neither abolitionists nor “nigger lovers,” as charged by the Missourians, the free soil convention “began by repudiating the charge of abolitionism, asserting its opposition to the admission of free Negroes or mulattoes, and denouncing any interference with slavery in the state.” Thus illustrating the difference between abolitionists who opposed slavery in universal terms and free-soilers who opposed the influence of Slave Power only as it affected their homesteading options, the anti-Shawnee legislature set up shop in Lawrence. And so, by the summer of 1855, the Shawnee (proslavery) and Lawrence (free soil) factions were organized, armed, and awaiting provocation to begin what everyone assumed would soon become civil war. Although it would have required him to take a firm stand regarding the use of federal power, Pierce’s most obvious choice was to protect the sanctity of the election process by sending federal troops to monitor a fair election. Jackson’s strong stand against South Carolina in the nullification crisis of 1832–33 could have served him well as a precedent for such bold, Union-saving action. Nonetheless, Pierce refused to act.45 Meanwhile, the North exploded in anti-Kansas-Nebraska Act fury. In 1854, the state legislatures of Maine, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Ohio all passed resolutions condemning the Act. The state elections that fall were similarly disastrous for the Democrats. In New York, twenty-nine of thirty-one elected congressmen held anti-Kansas-Nebraska Act beliefs; in Pennsylvania, the result was twenty-one winning candidates against and only four in favor; similar results flowed in all across the North, with the Whigs destroyed (about that much Douglas had been right), the Democrats losing support, the newly formed Republicans rising like a rocket, and the American Party, the institutional

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version of Know-Nothings and Nativists, also gaining ground. By 1855 the new breakdown in the U.S. House of Representatives was 108 Republicans, 83 Democrats, and 43 Americans/Know-Nothings. Clearly, the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the ensuing turmoil in Kansas was accelerating the demise of the old two party system and launching the nation in an unknown direction: the Whigs were dying, the Republicans were strong in the North yet weak nationally, the Democrats were looking more and more like an exclusively proslavery party popular only in the South, the American Party was surprisingly strong yet led by men of dubious character and based on principles that could not carry it for long, and abolitionists continued to gain ground, slowly but surely seeming less and less like extremists and more and more like defenders of free speech. While many Americans have bemoaned the small difference between Democrats and Republicans (lampooned in the second decade of the twentieth century by Eugene Debs as Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum), antebellum Americans found this landscape of disintegrating party allegiances truly frightening, if not dangerous, for they understood that a world without at least some certainty is a world where strange men rise to power and strange things happen. Thus, when Pierce delivered his third annual message on December 31, 1855, the nation was in turmoil, desperate for leadership, thirsting if not for answers then at least for a vision of how to preserve the peace and the Union.46 One can imagine the disappointment of citizens when they found Pierce spending the first ten pages of his message discussing the minutiae of U.S. foreign policy. The next four pages convey the Treasury figures for the year and mention briefly the progress of Indian removal on the western frontier. Then, finally, on the bottom of the fourteenth page, Pierce turns to Kansas. In yet another example of his ability to speak in indirect terms that dampen the sense of energy and urgency felt by his countrymen, Pierce opens his discussion with the circuitous and passive-voice claim that “In the Territory of Kansas there have been acts prejudicial to good order.” Indeed, the theft of two elections, the flooding of the territory with armed ruffians, and the intimidation of anyone seeking democratic rights could well be thought of in such terms. But for Pierce the “acts prejudicial to good order” have been committed not by the Missouri border ruffians but by the mythic horde of abolitionists supposedly swarming the state. While the nation’s papers contained stories every day of aggression, subterfuge, and other abuses of the democratic process in Kansas, Pierce argues that “Such subjects of political agitation as occupy the public mind consist to a great extent of exaggeration of inevitable evils, or overzeal in social improvement, or mere imagination

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of grievance.” Stolen elections, Pierce tells the world, are but part of the “inevitable evils” of society, what he describes as “the imperfections of human nature.” Seeking justice amounts here to “overzeal,” while complaints of the strong-arming of the law by marauding gangs indicate not a threat to democracy but the “mere imagination of grievance.” In fact, disregarding all evidence to the contrary, Pierce then argues that the “intelligence and patriotism of the people” will exert “through the ballot box their peaceful and silent but irresistible power.” On the one hand, one can imagine Pierce hoping these bland words of reassurance would have a calming effect on an enflamed nation; in this light the lack of urgency and detail in his message may be read as part of a rhetorical strategy aimed at not exacerbating an already dangerous situation. On the other hand, by December 1855, the nation was well aware that the ballot boxes in Kansas had been stuffed, burned, and stolen; by acting as if such atrocities were merely imagined grievances, Pierce’s message may be understood not only as endorsing the fraudulent elections but as indicating that political protest was futile in the face of the entrenched Shawnee legislature.47 Regardless of which political reading one finds more persuasive, Pierce’s message is written almost entirely in sentences where verbs precede nouns and where nouns are indefinite; the combination of these two grammatical patterns produces prose that is punchless and passive. Linking his passive prose to his political inaction, Pierce’s critics delighted in making fun of the president’s paralysis. For example, an image from Harper’s depicted the president’s half-hearted powers. A free-soil settler is tied to the “Democratic Platform,” which is stamped with “Central America,” “Cuba,” and “Kansas,” the three zones into which it was assumed the Democrats would attempt to spread slavery. The settler is held down on the right by Buchanan and Cass, the party’s elder statesmen, while on the left the burly Stephen Douglas stands on tiptoe while thrusting a slave down the free-soiler’s throat. Ever the impassive bystander, Pierce is drawn on his knees; instead of helping to ram the victim of Douglas’s aggression to his ugly fate, Pierce meekly clings to the free-soiler’s beard while bearing an ashen look of confusion. The image thus portrays Pierce as a not-quite-passive but not-in-charge follower of a party that was violating the doctrine of “popular sovereignty” by forcing slavery into Kansas.48 Pierce’s third message supported this thesis, for after leveling his “mere imagination of grievance” line he spent two pages restating Jacksonian states’ rights principles before excoriating the abolitionists. Considering his recent veto of Miss Dix’s Bill, reformers everywhere could not have heard the

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opening phrases of this attack as anything other than galling: “Although conscious of their inability to heal admitted and palpable social evils of their own, and which are completely within their jurisdiction, they engage in the offensive and hopeless undertaking of reforming the domestic institutions of other States, wholly beyond their control and authority. In the vain pursuit of ends by them entirely unattainable, . . . they peril the very existence of the Constitution.” Despite Pierce’s claims to the contrary, Berwanger, Holt, Gienapp and others have shown that a vast majority of the northern emigrants to Kansas were not abolitionists seeking to peril the Constitution by overthrowing slavery where it already existed; rather, they were homesteaders seeking good land, good government, and good shots at a new life in a new territory free from slavery. Ignoring the obvious and vast political differences between the hopes of such emigrants and the more aggressive desires of Garrison, Sumner, and other radical abolitionists, Pierce turns humble homesteaders into Constitution-threatening bogeymen; he escalates a relatively simple problem—an election has been stolen, so restage it, monitor it, enforce the law—into a cataclysm of revolutionary proportions.49 Indeed, Pierce here again seems either incapable of grasping or unwilling to recognize the shades of political argumentation in nuanced terms; instead he escalates differences of opinion into irreconcilable extremes. In this case, homesteading Republicans, anti-slave-power Free-Soilers, anticorruption Nativists, and even moderate Democrats—many of whom supported Dix’s attempt to redress the “palpable social evil” of shameful asylums—are all lumped together as heretics. Rather than celebrating and working with the full spectrum of opinions and options, Pierce conflates the world into two warring camps, asking “Will not different states be compelled, respectively, to meet extremes with extremes?” If this happens, “It is either disunion and civil war or it is mere angry, idle, aimless disturbance of public peace and tranquility.” Thus, in Pierce’s black-and-white, either-or world, the subtle dialectical give-and-take of democracy is flattened into an inevitable clash of nonnegotiable extremes: dissent and activism are reduced in this model to “mere angry, idle, aimless disturbance[s] of public peace and tranquility,” while Democratic Party principles are frozen into Holy Writ to be obeyed but never debated. In fact, in the penultimate paragraph of Pierce’s third annual message he characterizes all those Americans not adhering to the Democratic Party line as suffering from “vindictive hostility” and as instigating a “storm of frenzy and faction.” Pierce thus forwards a version of democracy in which citizens are obliged not so much to participate in their government and to debate its policies, thus enlivening and enriching the public dialogue,

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as simply to obey, to invoke Jacksonian dogma like a prayer warding off the evils of change and uncertainty. There can thus be little surprise to find William Seward rising in the Senate on January 24 to describe the message as “wanting in all the elements of statesmanship.”50 Three weeks later, Pierce produced a second major statement on the Kansas crisis. Delivered to Congress on January 24, 1856, this untitled letter made his attack upon imagined abolitionists even more explicit. Whereas his third annual message used the passive voice to cloud agency and vague language to depict “acts prejudicial to good order,” Pierce’s letter spoke directly of the botched Kansas election of November 1854 (the one that “elected” Winfield as a delegate to Congress). He grants that the election was complicated by “systematic interference,” yet he argues that such interference was not the work of ballot-box-stuffing Missourians but “one of the incidents of that pernicious agitation on the subject of the condition of the colored persons held to service in some of the States.” Contrary to all the available evidence, such “pernicious agitation” was the work, so Pierce argues, of those radical abolitionists pursuing the “propagandist colonization of the Territory.” Then, in a statement that illustrates what I have characterized as the paralyzing antipolitical structure of Pierce’s rhetoric, he laments that “Whatever irregularities may have occurred in the elections, it seems too late now to raise that question.” This unwillingness to intervene in an election that was clearly stolen encouraged the Free-Soilers, now understanding that they were on their own, without any recourse to federal intervention, to uphold their “illegal” legislature at Lawrence as the last line of defense against proslavery Missourians. Pierce warns, however, that the Free-Soilers’ act of self-defense “will become treasonable insurrection if it reach[es] the length of organized resistance by force to the fundamental or any other Federal law.” In short, “Our system affords no justification of revolutionary acts.” But Pierce has already made it clear that any form of opposition will be seen as revolutionary, meaning that all forms of political action contradicting Democratic Party dogma amount, in Pierce’s mind, to treason. In fact, Pierce repeated this threat less than three weeks later in his February 11, 1856, “proclamation,” where he commands “all persons engaged in unlawful combinations against the constituted authority of the Territory”—meaning Free-Soilers opposing the bogus Shawnee legislature—“to disperse and retire peaceably to their respective abodes.” Lest there be any doubt who Pierce envisions as the target of this command, he then lambastes “the fury of faction or fanaticism,” which are his standard code words for the work of abolitionists. The proclamation’s final paragraph begins with a lovely charge for “all good citizens to promote

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order by rendering obedience to the law, [and] to seek remedy for temporary evils by peaceful means,” but Pierce then qualifies this noble invocation by asking said good citizens “to discountenance and repulse the counsels and the instigations of agitators and of disorganizers.” Whereas the first phrase sounds like a properly presidential act of prudent statesmanship, the latter drags the sentence back down into partisan squabbling, for we know that for Pierce “agitators and disorganizers” does not mean armed border ruffians but abolitionists. Pierce’s letter to Congress of January 24 thus demonstrates how the northern Democrat elected in 1852 to defend the solid middle ground of moderation had become by 1856 one of the chief proponents of an extremist proslavery version of states’ rights.51 Allan Nevins has argued that reducing the political universe into warring extremes was both rhetorically foolish and politically unnecessary because many southern Democrats were less-than-enthusiastic supporters of the Kansas-Nebraska Act for three reasons. First, despite the widespread sense that “popular sovereignty” was an excuse for opening new territories to slavery, more historically minded observers knew that northern emigrants and industry would eventually swamp the few southerners willing to drag slaves onto contested lands. In the long run, then, Douglas’s “popular sovereignty” would give slavery nothing and was therefore not worth expending political capital to defend. Second, some southern Democrats felt that the 1850 compromise was a fair agreement that deserved recognition, not renunciation. To such observers, Douglas’s and Pierce’s voiding the Compromise was nothing less than a dishonorable, ungentlemanly act of political opportunism. Third, wiser souls of all parties knew that pushing the slavery issue would only hurt Democrats in the long run, for it was clear from as early as the 1852 presidential election that the Democrats were declining in the North. Pushing extreme positions on slavery could therefore only accelerate the party’s demise by linking it ever more firmly in the minds of moderate northerners with the Slave Power. Had his sense of politics been more sophisticated, or had his thoughts been less colonized by Jefferson Davis, Pierce could have worked with the senators and congressmen holding these concerns to find a more nuanced position that would neither have infuriated moderate northerners nor instigated border ruffians and free-soil settlers to even higher levels of violence.52 Unfortunately, however, Pierce’s three statements supporting the proslavery Shawnee legislature and attacking the perceived abolitionists behind the free-soil Lawrence legislature—including his third annual message, his untitled letter, and his proclamation—led to even more extreme actions in

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Kansas. Indeed, emboldened by the president’s repeated statements of support for their cause, proslavery men accelerated their attacks on Free-Soilers. In the spring of 1856, the proslavery Judge Lecompte indicted all the free-soil legislators in Lawrence for treason and appointed a grand jury that indicted the two leading free-soil papers, the Herald of Freedom and Free Press, for sedition. By the third week of May, proslavery forces had circled Lawrence; on May 21 a rag tag army of 750 mostly drunken thugs, riding under the banners of the Lecompton Guards, Doniphan Tigers, Platte County Rifles, and Kickapoo Rangers, stormed the town and burned to the ground the Free-State Hotel and free-soil Governor Robinson’s house. Reprisal killings and reprisals for reprisals followed fast and furious, including John Brown’s May 24 massacre of proslavery settlers at Pottawatomie, leaving Kansas in an enflamed, deadly state of chaos. Whittier memorialized the slide into violence as “A stain that shall never/ Bleach out the sun!” Contrary to Pierce’s description of the turmoil in Kansas as either an imagined grievance or the work of abolitionist fanatics such as Brown, Whittier portrayed the violence as the nasty work of Missouri ruffians, whom he portrayed as The foul human vultures Have feasted and fled; The wolves of the Border Have crept from the Dead.

Ultimately known as the “sacking of Lawrence,” and as one part of the drama of “bleeding Kansas,” the violence of the spring of 1856 convinced many northerners that slavery was destroying democracy, that “popular sovereignty” was but a charade, and that the Democrats indeed supported mob rule. As William Cullen Bryant observed in 1881 in his massive (and wonderfully polemical) Popular History of the United States, the struggle in Kansas between democracy and weapons, between moderate northern settlers and extremist southern raiders, between Free-Soil and slavery, was nothing less than “the real opening of the war of the Rebellion.”53 The day after the “sacking” of Lawrence, the spring’s slide into violence continued in Washington when Congressman Preston Brooks assaulted Charles Sumner in the United States Senate. Responding to proslavery aggression surrounding “bleeding Kansas,” Sumner delivered on the nineteenth and twentieth a fiery antislavery speech that came to be known as “Crimes Against Kansas.” Originally elected to the Senate as a Massachusetts FreeSoiler in 1851, Sumner had converted to the new Republican Party around 1855. His polemic was thus a rhetorical blast announcing what Pierce and

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the Democrats feared most: a radically activist antislavery party of national proportions. Sumner’s speech, however, while at times persuasive regarding the “plundering” of the “ballot-box,” that “shrine of popular institutions,” was marked by hyperbolic and vindictive rhetoric that many if not most who heard it found appalling. For example, Sumner claimed in one overheated passage that the recent events in Kansas amounted to “war—fratricidal, parricidal war—with an accumulated wickedness beyond the wickedness of any war in human annals.” The prosecutors of this war, then, whom Sumner called by name, were portrayed as nothing less than war criminals, complete with sordid sexual innuendoes. Senator Cass was the first to respond to Sumner’s tirade, which he denounced as “the most un-American and unpatriotic that ever grated on the ears of this high body.” Douglas followed Cass and emphasized the “depth of malignity” pervading Sumner’s rough attack on “personalities,” including Douglas, Atchison, Andrew Butler, Pierce, and enough other prominent politicians to lead one to believe that Sumner was intent on burning as many bridges as possible in one fell swoop. As much as any text of the period, Sumner’s speech indicates a nation losing control of its rhetoric and hence sliding toward a culture of extremes.54 South Carolina’s Preston Brooks was not amused by Sumner’s breach of decorum and took personal offense at what he believed were slurs Sumner had directed against both Brooks’s home state and the state’s senior Senator (and Brooks’s cousin) Andrew Butler. Hence, on May 22, 1856, in an act that quickly came to stand as a metaphor for the South’s attempt to silence all debate on the subject, Brooks assaulted Sumner on the floor of the Senate. Brooks attacked Sumner from behind, and repeatedly smashed him over the head with his cane as Sumner sat at his desk writing notes—Sumner never saw him coming. The beating was so brutal that Sumner never recovered full health. Perhaps even more than the “sacking” of Lawrence, this physical assault came to symbolize a violence-prone South curtailing the very possibilities of democratic dissent in the name of protecting slavery. Indeed, the damning caption across the top of one image depicting the event observed that “The symbol of the North is the pen; the symbol of the South is the bludgeon.” The shocked response of New York City’s George Templeton Strong indicates a sentiment then pervasive in the North, for while the elegant Strong had for years held firmly to a path of gentlemanly moderation, he observed on the night of the assault that “the reckless, insolent brutality of our Southern aristocrats may drive me into abolitionism yet.” This vision of the “insolent brutality” of southerners willing to trample democracy to defend slavery—Strong thus later accuses them of “bullying white men and

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breeding little niggers for sale”—was reinforced when most southern newspapers celebrated Brooks’s assault. George Bethune thus wrote to Buchanan during the presidential election of 1856 that “the Club which broke Mr. Sumner’s head, has . . . turned more votes than all other causes that were at work.” Indeed, the combination of “bleeding Kansas” and the Brooks assault, with Pierce doing nothing to stop the violence, left many citizens wondering about the president’s ability to lead the nation.55 The response of the New York Herald indicates that while Pierce was not alone in seeing the season’s events as part of a world dividing into extremes, he was nonetheless held responsible for allowing the situation to spin out of control. Edited by James Gordon Bennett, the Herald was not only “the most important and widely read American newspaper in the decades before the Civil War” but also an antebellum anomaly, for it was affiliated with no party and beholden to no special interests—hence Charles Sellers’s description of Bennett as “shrewdly apolitical.” Oliver Carlson has shown, however, that in 1852 Bennett had been an avid supporter of Pierce and the Democrats; the Herald’s displeasure in 1856 thus illustrates how even Pierce’s supporters had come to view the president as responsible for the nation sliding into madness. For example, in response to the Brooks assault and the sacking of Lawrence—news of both events broke almost simultaneously on the East Coast—the Herald ran a series of biting stories portraying a nation compromised by the dueling extremes of “Political Nigger Drivers and Nigger Worshippers.” Pierce and the Democrats were the “Political Nigger Drivers,” while Sumner and Garrison, et al., were the “Nigger Worshippers.” Other stories divided the world into “Nigger Lovers” and “Ruffianism,” with which Pierce’s policies were clearly associated. These ugly characterizations indicate that Pierce was not alone in failing to grasp the differences between moderate state’s rights Democrats and extremist “Political Nigger Drivers,” or between homesteading Free-Soilers and liberty-defending Republicans and radical “Nigger Worshipping” abolitionists. Indeed, by portraying the world as a false dilemma between warring extremes, the Herald’s vicious language can only be described as profoundly irresponsible. Pierce’s vague pronouncements throughout the crisis were clearly produced in no small part as an attempt to parry such invective with a proper gentleman’s sense of moderation and propriety. Refusing to recognize his rhetoric in this light, and thus rejecting his leadership altogether, the Herald warned in April that “Mr. Pierce is deluded . . . in his belief [that] he will receive the nomination” of his party to run for a second term, for “his only associates now are toadies . . . who bespatter him with praise before his face, laugh at him behind his back,

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and upon all occasions use him to ‘put money in their purse.’” Such “toadies” mollify the president with their praise, yet the Herald argues that their support is mere “humbugging,” “sheer moonshine,” for everyone knows that Pierce has so badly botched the presidency that the Democrats will have to find someone not associated with “bleeding Kansas” if the party is to have a chance in the next election.56 In this regard the Herald was correct, for at the party convention that summer Pierce was dumped in favor of James Buchanan, whose convenient absence from the country for the past years (as Minister to Britain) left his hands unsullied by the shame of bleeding Kansas. Thus, while Pierce sought to portray the Kansas crisis as but the imagined grievance of fanatical abolitionists, both the Herald and Democratic Party leaders understood that the crisis was real and that Pierce was ruined as a leader by his association with it. Indeed, as Strong observed in his diary on June 6, when news of Buchanan’s nomination reached New York City, “Pierce is served right. The South has used him sufficiently and thrown him away, enjoyed the fruits of his treason and kicked him out of doors. He’ll find cold comfort at home when he goes there; his neighbors have just been hanging him and Brooks in effigy.”57

sixth movement: pierce’s bitter farewell and the foreshadowing of “burning cities, ravaged fields, and slaughtered populations” When the Democrats convened in Cincinnati in June 1856, they dumped Pierce and chose James Buchanan as their presidential candidate. Democrats apparently believed that their troubles were caused by Pierce’s weak leadership rather than by party principles, for their party platform for 1856 repeated almost word for word much of the 1852 platform. When the 1856 platform offered new material it consisted of blunt promises that repeated Pierce’s rhetoric, including the claim that “The Democratic Party will resist all attempts at renewing, in Congress or out of it, the agitation of the slavery question.” Arguing that unchecked agitation “must end in civil war and disunion,” the platform called for “Non-Intervention by Congress with Slavery in State and Territory, or in The District of Columbia.” As we have seen above, such policies were central to Pierce’s presidency, meaning that the party believed that its difficulties were the result not of rotten doctrine but of Pierce’s mishandling of events. In fact, in what would appear to be a backhanded compliment, the party platform closed with a resolution

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proclaiming “That the administration of Franklin Pierce has been true to the great interests of the country. In the face of the most determined opposition it has maintained the laws, enforced economy, fostered progress, and infused integrity and vigor into every department of the government at home. . . . We therefore proclaim our unqualified approbation of its measures and its policy.” One wonders if by praising “the administration of Franklin Pierce” and “its measures,” but not directly praising Franklin Pierce himself, the Democrats sought to distinguish between their sound party organization and principles and his unsound management of them. Indeed, one wonders if the purpose of this proclamation of approbation was to demonstrate the nuanced manner in which Pierce now served as the party’s official scapegoat.58 Luckily for the Democrats, the Republicans were only strong in the North and the Americans (Know-Nothings) were only strong in the south Atlantic. Thus, as in 1852, the Democrats won the presidential election in 1856 courtesy of the fragmentation of the opposition: their Buchanan won 1,832,955 votes (45 percent), the Republicans’ Frémont received 1,349,537 votes (33 percent), and the Americans’ Fillmore polled 871,731 votes (22 percent). Breaking the vote into regional categories shows that the Democrats were destroyed by the Republicans in New England (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont), were running slightly ahead of them in middle Atlantic states (New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania), were falling slightly behind them on the northern frontier (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Iowa, and Wisconsin), and were running slightly ahead of the Americans and completely dominating the Republicans throughout the South. The question was, were American swing voters more likely in the near future to become Democrats or Republicans? Could the Democrats count votes for the American Party as votes against Republicans and thus as votes likely to turn Democratic, or could Republicans count votes for the American Party as votes against Democrats and thus likely to turn Republican? Regardless of how one answered that question, it was clear that the Democrats’ support for the Fugitive Slave Law and the Kansas-Nebraska Act had left them in deep trouble in the North. As Bryant put it, “The days of Northern men with Southern principles were over.”59 Nonetheless, the Democrats had again won the presidency and the Whigs were destroyed. With tensions in Kansas settling down and the respected Buchanan waiting to occupy the White House, you would imagine that Pierce would keep a low profile, savor his party’s victory, and count the days until he could flee from Washington back to New Hampshire. As Kenneth Stampp

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has observed, the occasion of his fourth annual message “might well have inspired a retiring chief executive to assume an air of magnanimity, to attempt pacification and avoid provocation, perhaps to review recent events with some measure of detachment.” But no—instead, Pierce delivered to Congress on December 2, 1856, a blistering jeremiad that ignited ferocious debates in both the Senate and the House. Rather than humbly making way for Buchanan and allowing the energy and excitement of the election to bring some sense of unity or at least change to the nation, Pierce’s message dredged up the most controversial aspects of his presidency and handed the Republicans a perfect postelection propaganda bonanza. “To the amazement of all and the horror of many,” Nevins writes, “he tore the bandage from the half-healed wounds of sectional passion, and threw salt into the raw and bleeding flesh.” In fact, the speech shines so unflattering a light on the conclusion of Pierce’s presidency that one of his recent apologists, when publishing Pierce’s presidential documents, sought to erase Pierce’s intemperate words regarding the Kansas crisis and the nation’s debates regarding slavery by excising them from the record! Recovering these erased passages and then reading the debates spawned by them offers chilling foresight into a nation edging toward war. I thus conclude my analysis of Pierce’s presidency by examining his fourth annual message and the bitter responses it called forth.60 Pierce’s fourth annual message begins with the controversial claim that “It is impossible to misapprehend the great principles which by their recent political action the people of the United States have sanctioned and announced.” He then recounts the various Jacksonian/Democratic commandments sanctioned by Buchanan’s election, all of which amount to “emphatically condemn[ing]” factionalism, radicalism, and the attempt to organize what Pierce calls “mere geographical parties.” “Schemes of this nature,” Pierce says, speaking now as the voice of the people, are “fraught with incalculable mischief ” and can only proceed in the light of day by engaging in subterfuge, by lurking “disguised by suggestions plausible in appearance.” Pierce thus seems to claim that the Republicans and the Americans, parties that together won more that 2.2 million votes—55 percent of all votes cast— are but schemers, that while they profess to have the nation’s interest at heart, the fact that they both opposed the Kansas-Nebraska bill proves that they are sandbagging the masses and operating as little more than a front for radical abolitionists. Indeed, in the next paragraph Pierce rails against the “odious task” and “indiscriminate invective” lingering behind the Republicans’ and Americans’ public pronouncements: “[P]retending to seek only to prevent the spread of the institution of slavery into the present or future inchoate

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States of the Union, [they] are really inflamed with desire to change the domestic institutions of existing States. . . . They seek an object which they well know to be a revolutionary one. . . . the only path to its accomplishment is through burning cities, and ravaged fields, and slaughtered populations, and all that is most terrible and foreign complicated with civil and servile war.” Aside from the incendiary tone of this passage, where the president of the United States charges legitimate opposition parties with secretly plotting revolution and civil war, what stands out here is the use of vague pronouns. Pierce never actually names the Republicans or the Americans or the Liberty Party (the small organization taking a hard abolitionist stand); instead, he refers throughout the paragraph to some unspecific “they” and “their” plot. But to whom is Pierce referring?61 In the following two paragraphs he continues to speak in general terms, including the famous warning that “Extremes beget extremes.” That charge is immediately followed by the claim that “Violent attack from the North finds its inevitable consequences in the growth of a spirit of angry defiance at the South,” but as we have seen throughout this chapter, it was Missouri border ruffians who stole the elections in Kansas, it was South Carolina’s Brooks who brutalized Sumner, and it was Jefferson Davis and his fire-eating allies in Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi who had been dreaming of secession from as early as 1850. How Pierce could interpret these instances of southern extremism into “Violent attacks from the North” left many who heard the speech dumbfounded. In fact, in a line that perfectly characterizes the chain of consequences put in motion by Douglas and his Kansas-Nebraska Act allies, but which Pierce attributes to unnamed northern revolutionaries, he warns that “they have entered into a path which leads nowhere unless it be to civil war and disunion.” This ability to reverse cause-and-effect reaches dizzying heights when Pierce reviews the tensions in Kansas, where “the cry of alarm from the North against imputed Southern encroachments . . . sprang in reality from the spirit of revolutionary attack on the domestic institutions of the South.” And so Pierce again flattens all political distinctions, turning westward homesteaders, whether Republican or moderate Democrat or nativist or any of the other myriad shades of gray in between, all into revolutionaries—stolen elections, assaulted newspapers, sacked cities, and random thuggery, Pierce tells the nation, are but the just results awaiting such troublemakers.62 As for his role in the mayhem, Pierce explains that while “it has been assumed that it was the duty of the Executive not only to suppress insurrectionary movements in Kansas, but also to see to the regularity of local elections,”

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good Jacksonians will know that “It needs little argument to show that the president has no such power.” This phrase illustrates my claim that Pierce’s political worldview was based on a selectively applied version of states’ rights that left the executive unable to intervene in the nation’s troubles, unless of course those troubles involved the extension of slavery. In contrast to this remarkable hauteur, this smug ability to wash his hands of all responsibility, Pierce warns his countrymen to beware “the shock of the discontents, the ambitions, the interests, and the exuberant,” for they will burrow into the nation’s life struggling to reform everything they touch. Better to stand aloof, Pierce tells us, to keep one’s hands in one’s pockets, than to venture into such troubling waters. Thus Franklin Pierce departed from the national stage, unloved by his own party, appreciated yet not respected by the extreme southerners whose interests he represented for four years, and despised by many in the North. If nothing else, Pierce played his role brilliantly, for he embodied as well as any man in the nation the paralyzing contradictions of exuberant hauteur in an age of extremes.63 Unfortunately for Pierce and the Democrats, his final performance of exuberant hauteur was not understood by listeners to be a bitter parting shot to be forgiven and forgotten; rather, it was received as a throwing down of a challenge, as an invitation to refight the issues of the past presidential election. Even the generally staid New-York Daily Times editorialized that “if President Pierce believes what he thus asserts, his retirement should be into an idiot or insane asylum.” Ripping into what it called “a disgraceful party harangue,” the Times observed that “the President dies hard . . . he dies cross—scolding and cursing like a drab.” Emboldened by such articles and their strong showing in the election, and welcoming a chance to continue their assault on the Democrats’ increasingly untenable positions, Republicans, Americans, and abolitionists gleefully pounced on Pierce’s “harangue,” thus initiating one of the antebellum period’s most sustained and vicious congressional debates.64 As is fitting, the deluge was initiated by the abolitionist John Hale, Pierce’s life-long nemesis; and as one might expect, the tone of Hale’s response mingled bitter political animosity with belittling personal characterizations: “I look upon the message of the President as a most unfortunate one. . . . I mean all due courtesy, kindness, and respect. His situation is certainly such as to appeal to the magnanimity rather than provoke the hostility of his opponents. If he had been content to submit to it, and go out, as it seemed to be the wish of his friends and foes that he should, without attempting to make such a charge as this against his political opponents, I should certainly

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have been content.” But of course Pierce’s exuberant hauteur meant that he could not swallow his humble pie to Hale’s contentment; Hale thus needled Pierce over his embarrassing predicament of being dumped by his own party while suggesting in sneering tones that Pierce’s fourth annual message was little more than Pierce lashing out against his perceived enemies despite the best advice and wishes of friends and foes alike. In fact, in a later exchange with Pennsylvania Senator William Bigler, who accused Hale of engaging in unsavory personal attacks on Pierce, Hale responded, in a passage that the Congressional Globe tells us received laughter, with these bitterly ironic lines: “Was it not a little ungrateful to turn him out—not to give him even the empty honor of a simple majority in the nominating convention? I feel hurt for the President. . . . I am not here as his vindicator, but I would defend anybody who had been treated in this way.” The fact that the Senate chamber echoed with laughter tells us that Hale was not alone in finding Pierce’s predicament worthy of a vindictive we-knew-it-all-along chuckle.65 Equally condescending portrayals of Pierce were forwarded in the Senate by Ohio’s Benjamin Wade, who described the departing president as “The poor discarded, repudiated man,” and in the House by Ohio’s John Sherman, who argued that “The ghost of his defeated hopes haunts him at every step, and he seeks to allay the phantom by ceaseless clamor.” Vermont Senator Jacob Collamer captured one popular response when he characterized Pierce’s message as but “an impotent sort of rage on the part of a disappointed, ambitious man.” Historians as well have pursued this thesis, as Allan Nevins has argued that “The petulance of a small man, repudiated and sorely humiliated, breathed in every paragraph.” The first observation to be made about Pierce’s fourth annual message, then, is that it seems to have sealed Pierce’s reputation as a man incapable of rising to meet his duty: instead of striving to heal the nation he enflamed it, instead of offering prudence and wisdom he dealt in calumny and invective, instead of maturely backing away to make room for Buchanan he petulantly leapt forward into a spotlight that was no longer his to fight a battle he had already lost.66 The second and more historically important observation to be made about Pierce’s farewell address is that it triggered a fierce bout of linedrawing regarding both the nation’s rapidly changing parties and the role of free speech in enabling such changes to bring some good to the nation. Pierce was careful in his speech to never finger any one party as the target of his attack, instead referring to “they,” “them,” and “their” intentions; nonetheless, Republicans understood themselves to be the object of his scorn. Maine’s Republican Congressman, Israel Washburn Jr. thus argued

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that Pierce’s Message “opens with studied and calumnious misrepresentations,” for in reputing to Republicans revolutionary abolitionist leanings it portrays them as pursuing goals they “deny and have ever denied.” Pierce is therefore but a “flippant libeler” who consciously pushes the nation toward extremes by refusing to acknowledge the subtle and varied shades of political differences between the parties, instead offering “swashing and malignant diatribes.” The dire implications of this rhetorical strategy of rejecting subtlety and dialogue in favor of tension-causing “calumnious misrepresentations” were addressed in the House by Ohio’s Matthias Nichols, who asked, “Are men to be denounced and held responsible at the bar of public opinion by the Executive of this nation for mere political differences? Is the badge of one party to mark the traitor—the badge of another to indicate the incorruptible patriot?” Surely this cannot be so, Nichols argues, unless Pierce intends to suggest that the 1,349,537 votes cast for the Republicans’ Frémont and the 871,731 votes cast for the Americans’ Fillmore amount to treason! Nichols suggests instead that those 2.2 million votes should be understood not as ballots for revolution but as the logical outcome of Pierce’s mismanagement of the national trust. “This administration having sown the wind,” Nichols observes, “has harvested the whirlwind.”67 Collamer put this claim in more immediate political perspective when he argued that “the votes for Mr. Fillmore [the American candidate] and Mr. Frémont [the Republican candidate] should be counted together; and they, put together, decide against the doctrines of the Cincinnati platform [the Democratic platform]. . . . It leaves the vote for Mr. Buchanan more than three hundred thousand in a minority.” As Collamer portrays it, the election was a ringing condemnation of the Democrats, whom Republicans and Americans alike perceived as nothing more than a free speech-destroying party of proslavery extremists. Collamer explains Pierce’s bitterness in relation to this perception through a folk parable: “I am really very much reminded of what the boy, when his father whipped him for calling him a liar, told him when he got through. Said he: ‘Father, the next time you lie, what shall I say?’” In short, Collamer argues that Pierce and the Democrats have been caught lying to the nation, espousing “popular sovereignty” but in fact pushing slavery, claiming to champion moderation while in fact acting like extremists. Pierce may chastise opposition parties as much as he likes, Collamer suggests, but the facts will not change, the Republicans and Americans will still know the truth of the matter whether they are rhetorically whipped by Pierce or not.68

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The third observation to be made about the debates following Pierce’s message concerns the inability of Pierce’s supporters to parry Republican and American critiques with anything other than hyperbolic claims that repeated the president’s most extreme arguments, especially the thesis that the Republicans were a front for radical abolitionists. For example, Mississippi Senator Albert Brown rose in response to Hale’s condemnation of Pierce and asked if the Republicans were sympathetic, if not enthusiastic, regarding the work of Lysander Spooner and “the Garrison and Gerrit Smith school of northern politicians.” Eric Foner has argued that this charge was true, but not until the 1860 elections—if then—when “the radicals made it quite plain that they would hardly be satisfied if a Republican government merely prevented slavery from expanding. From first to last, the stakes for which they aimed were far more comprehensive.” Regardless of whether one accepts Foner’s thesis, it is clear that this linking of Republicans and radicals was not yet firm in 1856. In fact, while Brown and others repeated this charge over and over again, as did Pierce, leading Republicans denied it over and over again, in a ritualistic dance of charge, denial, charge, denial. Maine’s Senator William Fessenden thus responded the next day to Brown’s charges by arguing that they, like Pierce’s message, “studiously misrepresented facts” and “sedulously endeavored to fix upon a very large portion of the people of this country accusations” known to be “applicable to but few.” After a terse exchange with Senator Brown, Fessenden then offered the following assessment of Pierce’s rhetorical strategy: “The President well knew, well understood, that there was a wide distinction between the small, powerless class of ultra-Abolitionists in the free States, and the great party which nominated John C. Frémont . . . yet throughout this message, he makes no distinction between these two parties, but endeavors to fasten on the country the idea that they are one and the same.” Thus, while Pierce warned Congress in his message that “extremes beget extremes,” Fessenden argues here that it has been Pierce and his supporters who have pushed the nation toward extremes by falsely equating Republicans and radical abolitionists. In fact, it is clear from the debates following Pierce’s fourth annual message that the eventual articulation of Republicans and radicals was in large part a response to the fanaticism of Pierce’s defenders.69 Indeed, the fourth observation to be made about the debates surrounding Pierce’s farewell address is that the southern response to them was frequently so vociferous and so aggressive that it confirmed the worst northern suspicions about the Slave Power’s arrogance. While some of Pierce’s supporters in these debates, especially Brown, demonstrate a nuanced sense of

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impending political alignments, many southerners seemed utterly heedless of the effect of their words. Perhaps the best example of this is when South Carolina’s Senator Andrew Butler, the gentleman in whose name Brooks assaulted Sumner, explained the linkage between Republicans and abolitionists via a folksy parable. Responding to Wade, Butler observed “Now, sir, the gentleman [Wade] says he does not wish to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States. I do not know that he does; but I have heard of a man who said he would not burn down another’s barn, but he would set fire all around the woods.” The Congressional Globe tells us this line was followed with laughter, thus indicating not only the comic nature of the tale but the fact that many observers in the Senate that day must have sensed the kernel of truth buried within the tale. For surely Sumner, Chase, Wade, and others had been speaking in Congress for years in a couched manner that amounted to precisely the strategy described by Butler’s tale of an incendiary farmer. But Butler could not rest satisfied with his critical folk parable. Instead, he went on to illustrate precisely why Republicans and abolitionists would need to form an alliance in 1860 to defeat the Democrats. After attacking the hypocrisy of the North, Butler argues that “Our slaves . . . are perfectly happy. Some of them run away, and they have got to coming back. That is the worst of it with those fellows. They cannot stay away. . . . The best Fugitive Slave Law is the fact that they cannot get any work or anything to eat when they go to the North.” While the laughter following these lines indicates that many of the assembled Senators could still be swayed by the charming manner of the senior Senator from South Carolina, even when talking about slavery, Butler’s argument also demonstrates the arrogance and smug sense of cultural superiority that would drive many moderate northerners to positions increasingly radical regarding Butler and his fellow Slave Power aristocrats.70 While Butler was respected for his ability to speak in such biting yet folksy ways, younger and hotter-headed congressmen added fuel to the fire with intemperate harangues. Tennessee’s George Jones rose in the House to attack “the abolitionized wing of the Know-Nothing Party, under the name of Black Republicans,” hence insulting some 2.2 million voters in half a sentence. Anticipating the eventual merger of these traitors in a party powerful enough to topple the Democrats, Jones warned that “whenever that time comes, we in that portion of the Union which is in a minority shall be prepared to assert our rights, and vindicate them at all hazards, and to the last extremity.” Democracy, Jones blathers, will only be cherished if the Democrats are in power; otherwise, the North should expect civil war.

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North Carolina’s Lawrence Branch followed Jones two days later with a gem of bombast in which he predicted that the South would be forced to fight a civil war in order to defend the rights of free white men because the Republicans “would enslave the white man of Kansas” and would “deprive him of his political freedom, that the negro may be free.” Jones and Branch stand as stunning examples of rhetorical ineptitude—case studies in how to unite your enemies, make your allies look callous, and prove yourself more rash than wise.71 Such exchanges, denunciations, and pronouncements dragged on and on, well into mid-January, meaning that for six grueling weeks much of the government’s energy was poured into rehashing Pierce’s message. Many men spoke with humor and some spoke with caution, but most of Pierce’s defenders spoke in passionate phrases that only demonstrated to moderate northerners that the South did not respect the democratic process and could see no distinction between opposing slavery’s extension into new lands and its abolition from states where it existed already. Repeated threats of secession only made matters worse. Thus, despite the fact that the Democrats had won the presidential election in November, by December they found themselves faced with a raucous Congress where Republicans, Know-Nothings, and Abolitionists were increasingly united in their opposition to what was perceived as the Slave Power’s domination of national politics. While it would take the presidential election of 1860 to make the world-changing results of this alliance apparent to all observers, Pierce’s fourth annual message clearly accelerated the rhetorical sparring that showed why it was necessary. Indeed, although it would come for reasons other than those attributed by Pierce, and arguably for reasons ostensibly caused by or at least worsened by Pierce, he was nonetheless correct in foreseeing the nation’s imminent rendezvous with “burning cities, ravaged fields, and slaughtered populations.”

coda In closing my analysis of Franklin Pierce’s exuberant hauteur in an age of extremes it is instructive to return to one of the era’s dinosaurs: Michigan’s Lewis Cass. For while Pierce left Washington in the spring of 1857 amid a hailstorm of criticism, his life-long Democratic colleague lost his bid to return as one of Michigan’s senators when the state legislature, jolted toward the Republicans by events in Kansas, selected Zachariah Chandler instead of Cass. Cass’s partydoctrine-defending defense of Pierce’s farewell address thus illustrates the

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increasing inability of old school Jacksonian Democrats to understand how the nation’s remarkable expansion—its Manifest Destiny—was forever changing the role of the federal government. Like Pierce, Cass hoped to live in an older world where elite gentlemen gathered to ponder the fate of the masses; he thus believed that all agitation was “not only profitless but mischievous.” While he was no hothead, Cass agreed with Pierce that abolition was leading “to a condition of things that will be inevitably followed by the dissolution of the Confederacy.” Thus, in a statement meant to attack perceived extremists, Cass offers an extremist’s nightmare scenario. Then, in a line that echoes Hawthorne’s summary of Pierce’s position on slavery, Cass lamented that “The problem of liberation is a fearful one. Its solution is beyond the sagacity of man. It can be solved by God alone.” Like Pierce, then, Cass understood that the properly Jacksonian response to the preceding years’ crises was to do nothing in an energetic way, to maintain a stiff upper lip while invoking popular rights, to demonstrate elite leadership by carrying one’s self with exuberant hauteur. Lingering in the shadow of his defeat, Cass thus continued to intone the principles that left him—like Pierce—increasingly distanced from political currents; it is little wonder that one of his biographers refers to him in these final days as “losing touch with political realities.”72 While I have demonstrated throughout this essay my agreement with Nevins that Pierce’s presidency was “the coarsest, most erratic, and most barren administration in the nation’s history,” and that it “represented a collapse of American statesmanship,” Cass’s statements above prove that Pierce was not alone in the paradoxical habit of first shrinking from the most pressing crises of his time but then responding to them in ways that only increased political tensions. For like Pierce, Cass too hoped that doing nothing in a gentlemanly manner would suffice until a merciful God intervened to save the nation from its extremists. Events would soon prove that more forceful actions were necessary, but in the meantime Pierce and Cass and the Democratic faithful would hold on by doing nothing, hoping to ride out the storm in style by denouncing agitation of all kinds and clinging for dear life to Jacksonian theology. In so doing, Pierce and Cass illustrated the exuberant hauteur of men incapable of finding productive rhetorical avenues in an age of extremes.73

acknowledgments Early drafts of this essay benefited from comments provided by Marty Medhurst, Cara Finnegan, Robert Ferrell, Mari Tonn, and the participants in the “Before the Rhetorical Presidency” Conference held at Texas A&M University, February 28–March 3, 2002. A subsequent draft was improved by the comments of my colleagues in Vernon Burton’s Southern History

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Working Group at the University of Illinois, where I have had the good fortune of learning from Robert McColley, Larry Ratner, Phillip Padula, Gardner Rogers, James Wheeler, Phil Carpenter, and Max Edelson.

abbreviations used in the notes ACG, 33:1 = Appendix to The Congressional Globe, for the First Session, Thirty-Third Congress, Containing Speeches and Important State Papers, etc. (Washington: Rives, 1854). ACG, 34:1 = Appendix to The Congressional Globe, for the First Session, Thirty-Fourth Congress, Containing Speeches and Important State Papers, etc. (Washington: Rives, 1856). ACG, 34:3 = Appendix to The Congressional Globe, for the Third Session, Thirty-Fourth Congress, Containing Speeches and Important State Papers, Laws, etc. (Washington: Rives, 1857). CG, 33:1 = The Congressional Globe: Containing the Debates, Proceedings, and Laws, of the First Session of the Thirty-Third Congress (Washington: Rives, 1854). CG, 34:1 = The Congressional Globe: Containing the Debates, Proceedings, and Laws, of the First Session of the Thirty-Fourth Congress (Washington: Rives, 1856). CG, 34:3 = The Congressional Globe: Containing the Debates, Proceedings, and Laws, of the Third Session of the Thirty-Fourth Congress (Washington: Rives, 1857). CMPP = A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of The Presidents, 1789–1908, Vol. 5, ed. James Richardson (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1909). FP = Roy Franklin Nichols, Franklin Pierce: Young Hickory of the Granite Hills (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958). Ordeal = Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, Volume 2: A House Dividing, 1852–1857 (New York: Scribner’s, 1947). PFP = Larry Gara, The Presidency of Franklin Pierce (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991).

notes 1. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn: n.p., 1855), 95, 55; regarding the politics of the 1855 edition see Stephen Hartnett, Democratic Dissent & The Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 132–72; for a collection of the early reviews, including those written anonymously by Whitman, see Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Kenneth Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); for an overview, see David Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Knopf, 1995). 2. Robert Gunderson, “The Oxymoron Strain in American Rhetoric,” Central States Speech Journal 28 (1977): 92–95, quotations from 95; for an updated version of Gunderson’s thesis that emphasizes the “conforming individualist,” see Sacvan Bercovitch, Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993). 3. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Address to the Citizens of Concord,” May 3, 1851, in Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, ed. Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 53, 54, 57, 56, 67, 59, 71, 57, 58; and see Len Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990). 4. Emerson, “Address,” 68; John Greenleaf Whittier, “Stanza for the Times” (1850), in The Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, Household Edition, with Illustrations (Boston:

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Houghton, Mifflin, 1891), 168; Samuel Ringgold Ward, “The Fugitive Slave Bill,” March 25, 1850, speech in Faneuil Hall, in Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787–1900, ed. Philip Foner and Robert Branham (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 218; Emerson, “Address,” 68; Ward, “Fugitive Slave Bill,” 220; Reverend Jermain Wesley Loguen, “I Won’t Obey the Fugitive Slave Law,” October 4, 1850, speech in the Syracuse city hall, in Foner and Branham, Lift Every Voice, 226, emphasis added; on Ward and Loguen’s work on the underground railroad, see Larry Gara, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1961), 93–114; on African Americans’ responses to the Fugitive Slave Law, see Stanley Campbell, The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), 62–65, and see 199–207 for a record of cases triggered by the Law. 5. On Rynders’ brutes see Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero, 140–42; the best overview of antiabolition violence is Leonard Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970); for a scathing critique of antiabolitionist violence, see Defensor (William Thomas), The Enemies of the Constitution Discovered, or, An Inquiry into The Origin and Tendency of Popular Violence, etc. (New York: Leavitt, Lord, & Co., 1835). 6. On Christiana see Thomas Slaughter, Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); on the abolitionists’ using violence against them as a means of justifying their politics, see Stephen Howard Browne, Angelina Grimké: Rhetoric, Identity, and the Radical Imagination (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999), 35–56; Hartnett, Democratic Dissent, 11–17; and Dwight Lowell Dumond, Antislavery Origins of the Civil War in the United States (1939; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), 51–66. 7. William Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 511–35 in general, “herd” on 517, voting figures on 526; regarding Emerson’s attacks on Webster, see his March 7, 1854, speech at New York City’s Tabernacle, “The Fugitive Slave Law,” in Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 73–89, and see Jeffrey Kurtz, “Condemning Webster: Judgment and Audience in Emerson’s ‘Fugitive Slave Law,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87:3 (2001): 278–90; Telegraph quoted from Campbell, Slave Catchers, 59–60; Whittier’s portrayal of Webster as a fallen giant is from his “Ichabod!” in The Poetical Works, 146. 8. On Clay see James Jasinski, “The Forms and Limits of Prudence in Henry Clay’s Defense of the Compromise Measures,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 454–78; on Pierce’s meeting with Webster see FP, 180–81; Pierce’s letter quoted in FP, 202. 9. Ward, “The Fugitive Slave Bill,” 219. 10. PFP, 29; Ordeal, 41; Pierce was so enamored of his good looks and style that he frequently lorded over the White House in “a dazzling dressing-gown lined with cherry-colored silk” (Ordeal, 42); FP, 172, and see 86 on his drinking and 283 on his dancing; Gara concludes that “by today’s standards” Pierce was “probably a functioning alcoholic” (PFP, 31); see the extensive coverage of Mrs. Pierce in FP; for a helpful chronological overview of Pierce’s career see Irving Sloan, Franklin Pierce, 1804–1869: Chronology—Documents—Bibliographical Aid (New York: Oceana, 1968), 1–16. 11. Greeley quoted in PFP, 24; Ordeal, 11. 12. FP, 82–88; PFP, 17–23; Freehling, Road to Disunion, 477–79; for a detailed account of New Hampshire Democrats’ long battles against Free-Soilers and abolitionists, see Donald Cole, Jacksonian Democracy in New Hampshire, 1800–1851 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 216–45; on the rhetoric of vague constitutionalism and the dialectics of assent and dissent, see Hartnett, Democratic Dissent, 11–17, 33–39. 13. Pierce quoted in FP, 193.

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14. No author, Franklin Pierce and His Abolitionist Allies (n.p. [but surely the Whig Party], 1852), 11–13, 8; the argument that this pamphlet was authored by Truman Smith is made in Michael Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 731. 15. No author, Franklin Pierce and His Abolitionist Allies (n.p. [but surely the Democratic Party], 1852), 4; and see Thomas Blaisdell Jr. and Peter Selz, The American Presidency in Political Cartoons: 1776–1976 (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Peregrine Smith, 1976). 16. No author, The Abolitionist Attack! Abolitionists Against General Pierce (n.p. [but surely the Democratic Party], 1852), 1; on the contested place of slavery in the Constitution, see Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson (New York: Sharpe, 1996), 1–33, and Stephen Hartnett and Michael Pfau, “The Confounded Rhetorics of Race in Revolutionary America,” in Rhetoric, Independence, and Nationhood; Volume I of A Rhetorical History of The United States, ed. Stephen E. Lucas (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2009). 17. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Life of Franklin Pierce (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1852), 111, 113, emphasis added; two equally insipid campaign biographies are Sketches of the Lives of Franklin Pierce and Wm. R. King, Candidates of the Democratic Republican Party for the Presidency and Vice Presidency of the United States (n.p. [but surely the Democratic Party], 1852), and D. W. Bartlett, The Life of Gen. Franklin Pierce, of New-Hampshire, The Democratic Candidate for President of the United States (Auburn, Ala.: Derby & Miller, 1852). 18. No author attributed (but likely George Sanders, the editor), “Eighteen Fifty-Two, and The ‘Coming Man,’” The Democratic Review 30:6 (June 1852): 481–92, quotations from 485, 483; publication figures from Ordeal, 33; made important by John O’Sullivan during the death penalty debates of 1843–44 and the Texas annexation crisis of 1844–45, when it was known as The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, by 1852 the renamed Democratic Review was edited by George Sanders; by 1853 the Review would be edited by D.W. Holly—regardless of who was editing the journal, throughout the period it was a stalwart organ of lively work championing the Democrats. 19. PFP, 35, 38; Paul Boller Jr., Presidential Anecdotes, Revised Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 114; Holt, American Whig Party, 742; for the Democrats’ response to these charges see Vindication of the Military Character and Services of General Franklin Pierce, by His Companions in Arms in Mexico, Called Out by the Aspersions and Innuendoes of a Portion of the Whig Press (n.p., [but surely the Democratic Party], 1852); and see FP, 147–70, and Hawthorne, Life of FP, 66–108; FP, 216; PFP, 38–41; for a detailed tally of the vote, broken down into states and regions, see W. Dean Burnham, Presidential Ballots, 1836–1892 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955), table IV, 246–57. 20. For Nevins’s colorful portrayal of the Washington social scene, see Ordeal, 54–58, quotation from 55; on Pierce’s early days in the White House, see FP, 232–44. 21. Franklin Pierce, “Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1853, in CMPP, 198, 199; on the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny see Hartnett, Democratic Dissent, 93–131; on Whig opposition to expansion see Lyon Rathbun, “The Debate Over Annexing Texas and The Emergence of Manifest Destiny,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 4:3 (2001): 459–93. 22. On Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions, see Frank Anderson, “Contemporary Opinions of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions” (part one), American Historical Review 5 (1889): 45–63, and “Contemporary Opinions of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions” (part two), American Historical Review 5 (1889): 225–52. On Jackson’s veto see Robert Remini, Andrew Jackson and The Course of American Freedom, 1822–1832 (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 251–56; Hawthorne, Life of FP, 28–29. 23. Rush Welter, The Mind of America, 1820–1860 (New York: Columbia University

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Press, 1975), 172; and see Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (New York: Vintage, 1960), 101–41. 24. Pierce, “Inaugural Address,” in CMPP, 200, 201 (emphasis added), 201. 25. Ibid., 202. 26. Ibid. 27. Franklin Pierce, “First Annual Message,” December 5, 1853, in CMPP, 214–16; for further evidence of this contradiction between Pierce’s minimalist rhetoric and the reality of a rising Leviathan, see his “Second Annual Message,” December 4, 1854, in CMPP, 275–88. 28. Pierce, “First Annual Message,” in CMPP, 224; Pierce, “Second Annual Message,” in CMPP, 292; Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin demonstrate how such antipolitical thinking pervaded the culture in Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 119–51. 29. Dedication plate to Horace Greeley, Hints Toward Reforms, in Lectures, Addresses, and Other Writings (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1850); regarding the movements noted above, see, on singing, Robert James Branham and Stephen Hartnett, Sweet Freedom’s Song: “My Country ’Tis of Thee” and Democracy in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); on temperance, W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); on prison reform, David Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); on women’s rights, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak For Her (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989); on working class agitation, Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City & The Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); on religious activism, Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); on the death penalty, Louis Masur, Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); and for an overview, Steven Mintz, Moralists & Modernizers: America’s Pre-Civil War Reformers (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995). 30. David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper, 1976), 241; George Foster, “A Night Ramble” (1850), 107, “The Mock Auctions” (1849), 208, “The City at Daylight” (1850), 194, 195, 196, and “Wall Street and the Merchants’ Exchange” (1853), 221, all in New York by Gaslight and Other Urban Sketches by George Foster, ed. Stuart Blumin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); on the response to immigration, see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 226–60; on the response to capitalism and immigration, see Michael Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: Norton, 1978), 139–81. 31. Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 234, and see 208–40 on insanity; regarding the sensational portrayal of the results of modern capitalism, see Stephen Hartnett, “Fanny Fern’s 1850 Ruth Hall, The Cheerful Brutality of Capitalism, and The Irony of Sentimental Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 1–18; regarding the historical links between crime and capitalism see Stephen Hartnett, “Prisons, Profit, Crime, and Social Control: A Hermeneutic of the Production of Violence,” in Race, Class, and Community Identity, ed. Andrew Light and Meck Nagel (New York: The Humanities Press, 2000), 199–21; Sweetser quoted in Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum, 116; on Ray, Kirkbride, and Jarvis see Rothman, 109–54. 32. Whitman, preface, Leaves of Grass, vi; the image appeared originally in Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion (June 5, 1852), 361. 33. Dix’s meeting with Pierce is recounted in David Gollaher, Voice for the Mad: The Life of Dorothea Dix (New York: Free Press, 1995), 320–21, and see 307–33 on Pierce’s veto; the

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March 8, 1854, vote passing the bill in the Senate is in CG, 33:1, 572; the April 19 vote passing the bill in the House is in CG, 33:1, 954; William Seward, speaking in the Senate, June 19, 1854, in ACG, 33:1, 959. 34. Franklin Pierce, “Veto Message,” May 3, 1854, in CMPP, 247, 248, 249. 35. Ibid., 248–49. 36. On Dix and Hale’s support of “Miss Dix’s Bill,” see Thomas Brown, Dorothea Dix: New England Reformer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 150–55; on Pierce’s battles against Hale, see FP, 130–46, 177–79; as a symbolic gesture of reuniting the Hunker and Barnburner branches of the Democratic Party, Pierce toyed with the idea—but ultimately rejected it—of including Dix in his cabinet, see FP, 219–21. 37. Pierce, “Veto Message,” in CMPP, 250, 251. 38. Isaac Toucey, speaking in the Senate, June 21, 1854, in ACG, 33:1, 990; and see Delaware Senator John Clayton’s June 15, 1854, celebration of Pierce’s defense of Jacksonian principles in ACG, 33:1, 993–1002; no author attributed (but likely D. W. Holly, the editor), “Compromises,” The United States Review (July 1854): 1–16, quotation from 7. 39. Pierce, “Veto Message,” in CMPP, 251; Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857; Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1984), 77; Archibald Dixon, speaking in the Senate, May 3, 1854, in CG, 33:1, 1065; on previous federal land grants, see Brown, Dorothea Dix, 150, 165; Thomas Brown, “Franklin Pierce’s Land Grant Veto and The Kansas-Nebraska Session of Congress,” Civil War History 42 (1996): 98–99; and George M. Stephenson, The Political History of the Public Lands From 1840–1862, From Pre-Emption to Homestead (Boston: Badger, 1917), which situates Dix’s bill within the debates regarding the Homestead Bill, which was not passed until Lincoln signed it in to law on May 20, 1862. 40. Pierce, “Veto Message,” in CMPP, 251; Brown, Dorothea Dix, 206. 41. James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, abridged and edited by Allan Nevins (1892; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 118; Union and Marcy both quoted in William Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 81; see the exchanges in the Senate the day before the bill was passed (on March 4), featuring Douglas prominently, in ACG, 33:1, 302–42; on Douglas’s motivations see Freehling, Road to Disunion, 546–65, and Ordeal, 78–121. 42. Holt, Political Crisis, 149; for visual representation of this onward march of slavery, see the maps in Mark Carnes, John Garraty, and Patrick Williams, Mapping America’s Past: A Historical Atlas (New York: Holt, 1996), 104; three-fifths clause figures from Freehling, Road to Disunion, 559; Samuel Johnson, The Battle Cry of Freedom: The New England Emigrant Aid Company in the Kansas Crusade (1954; Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1977), 221. 43. All information in this paragraph paraphrased from Freehling, Road to Disunion, 538–46; Johnson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 208–12; and Ordeal, 302; on the questions of economic development and slavery’s relationship to modern capitalism, see Hartnett, Democratic Dissent, 49–92, and Laurence Shore, Southern Capitalists: The Ideological Leadership of An Elite, 1832–1885 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 1–78. 44. Johnson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 212–21; Eugene Berwanger, The Frontier Against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and The Slavery Extension Controversy (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 98, 107. 45. On voting fraud see Ordeal, 313, 385; on Pierce’s handling of the situation see FP, 407–49, and PFP, 101–26; quotation from Ordeal, 392; and see Larry Gara, “Slavery and the Slave Power: A Crucial Distinction,” Civil War History 15 (1969): 5–18. 46. Ordeal, 146, 341–42, 414; regarding the rise of the American Party and Know-Nothings, Gienapp argues that its meteoric ascent was not about slavery but booze: “Anti-liquor sentiment rather than antislavery feeling was responsible for the party’s surge” (Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, 67); Holt concurs, and argues that northerners who joined the Nativists

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were “even more worried about Catholics and foreigners” than slavery (Holt, Political Crisis, 159); on the other hand, Stephen Maizlish argues that the American Party contained large numbers of German Protestants and that the party’s strength lay in its ability to articulate an anti-Slave Power position more populist than the Republicans (see “The Meaning of Nativism and the Crisis of the Union: The Know-Nothing Movement in the Antebellum North,” in Essays on American Antebellum Politics, 1840–1860, ed. William Gienapp, et al., [College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1982], 166–98). 47. Franklin Pierce, “Third Annual Message,” December 31, 1855, in CMPP, 340, 341, 349. 48. See the image at http://loc.harpweek.com/LCPoliticalCartoons/IndexDisplayCar toonMedium.asp?SourceIndex=People&IndexText=Pierce%2C+Franklin%2C+his+presiden cy+criticized&UniqueID=9&Year=1856 (accessed January 16, 2008). 49. On the political mischief produced by the rhetoric of escalation see Stephen Hartnett and Ramsey Eric Ramsey, “‘A Plain Public Road’: Evaluating Arguments for Democracy in a Post-Metaphysical World,” Argumentation and Advocacy 35 (1999): 97–106. 50. Pierce, “Third Annual Message,” in CMPP, 349, 350; William Seward, speaking in the Senate, January 24, 1856, in CG, 34:1, 290. 51. Pierce, “Third Annual Message,” in CMPP, 354, 355, 358; Franklin Pierce, “By the President of the United States of America. A Proclamation,” February 11, 1856, in CMPP, 390, 391. 52. Ordeal, 134–38; Pierce’s reticence to intervene was supported by a legal tradition in which fear of an over-reaching judiciary produced the argument that doing nothing was a way of respecting the Constitution’s delegated powers; see Robert Cover, Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975), 192–93, 258, and 260–67 for excerpts from the key cases. 53. Ordeal, 434–37; Rhodes, History of the U.S., 185–93; Whittier, “Le Marais Du Cygne,” in The Poetical Works, 243; William Cullen Bryant and Sydney Howard Gay, A Popular History of the United States, from the First Discovery of the Western Hemisphere By the Northmen, to the End of the Civil War, Volume 4 (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1881), 414. 54. Later known as “Crimes Against Kansas,” Sumner’s two-day-long speech, covering May 19 and 20, may be found in ACG, 34:1, 529–44 (quotations from 530); Lewis Cass speaking in the Senate, May 20, 1856, in ACG, 34:1, 544; Stephen Douglas, speaking in the Senate, May 20, 1856, in ACG, 34:1, 544. 55. On Brooks’ assault see Rhodes, History of the United States, 171–84, and Ordeal, 446–49; the image may be seen in Hartnett, Democratic Dissent, 177; the caption is a quotation from a May 31, 1856, speech by Henry Ward Beecher at a rally on Sumner’s behalf in New York City; for a collection of such speeches see Cambridge Citizens, The Sumner Outrage. A Full Report of the Speeches at The Meeting of Citizens in Cambridge, June 2, 1856, in Reference to the Assault on Senator Sumner (Cambridge, Mass.: John Ford, 1856); entries of May 22 and 29, 1856, in The Diary of George Templeton Strong, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, abridged by Thomas Pressly (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 91, 92; Bethune to Buchanan, November 21, 1856, quoted in Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, 440. 56. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 50; Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 386; Oliver Carlson, The Man Who Made the News: James Gordon Bennett (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1942), 248–50; by 1856 Bennett carried a grudge against Pierce because he did not nominate Bennett to be Minister to France; see James Crouthamel, Bennett’s New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1989), 63–67; “Political Nigger

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Drivers and Nigger Worshippers,” New York Herald (May 24, 1856), 4; “A Fight in the Senate Chamber—Niggerism and Ruffianism the Order of the Day—What Next?” New York Herald (May 23, 1856), 4; “The Latest News,” New York Herald (April 4, 1856), 4; “The Latest News,” New York Herald (April 2, 1856), 4; no authors listed for any of these articles, but we may assume the latter two were written by Bennett. 57. Strong, Diary, 94; ever the faithful party organ, The United States Democratic Review (formerly The United States Review, and the Democratic Review before that) put a happy face on the convention in “The Convention—The Candidates” (July 1856, 521–31). 58. Democratic Platform of 1856, in Porter and Johnson, National Party Platforms, 26–27; and see PFP, 157–80, and FP, 466–69. 59. Voting figures and regional breakdowns from Burnham, Table IV, Presidential Ballots, 246–57; Bryant, Popular History of the US, 424; and see Gienapp, Origins of Republican Party, 413–48. 60. Kenneth Stampp, America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 6; Ordeal, 517; the doctoring of Pierce’s message occurs in Irving Sloan, ed., Franklin Pierce, 1804–1869 (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana, 1968), where Pierce’s fourth annual message (78–83 in this collection) mysteriously cuts from the middle of page 398 (in the complete, CMPP version) to the bottom of 410, thus erasing twelve pages of Pierce’s most embarrassing invective. 61. Franklin Pierce, “Fourth Annual Message,” December 2, 1856, in CMPP, 397, 398, 399; the Americans’ 1856 platform favored “eschewing all sectional questions, and uniting upon the purely national” (Porter and Johnson, Party Platforms, 23), yet as demonstrated above in note 46, the party was widely understood to be energized by anti-Kansas-Nebraska Bill sentiment. 62. Pierce, “Fourth Annual Message,” in CMPP, 399, 404. 63. Ibid., 406, 417. 64. No author attributed, “The President’s Message,” New-York Daily Times (December 3, 1854), 3; the text of Pierce’s Message is printed in five columns on page 2. 65. John P. Hale, speaking in the Senate, December 2 and 11, 1856, in CG, 34:3, 10, 95. 66. Benjamin F. Wade, speaking in the Senate, December 4, 1856, in CG, 34:3, 27; John Sherman, speaking in the House, December 8, 1856, in CG, 34:3, 53; Jacob Collamer, speaking in the Senate, December 9, 1856, in ACG, 34:3, 49; Ordeal, 517. 67. Israel Washburn, speaking in the House, December 10, 1856, in ACG, 34:3, 34, 36; Matthias Nichols, speaking in the House, December 16, 1856, in ACG, 34:3, 45, 46. 68. Jacob Collamer, speaking in the Senate, December 9, 1856, in ACG, 34:3, 49, 54. 69. Albert Brown, speaking in the Senate, December 2, 1856, in CG, 34:3, 11–12; Foner, Free Soil, 119; William Fessenden, speaking in the Senate, December 3, 1856, in CG, 34:3, 30, 31. 70. Albert Butler, speaking in the Senate, December 4, 1856, in CG, 34:3, 28, 29; for an analysis of such proslavery rhetoric, see Hartnett, Democratic Dissent, 40–92. 71. George Jones, speaking in the House, December 16, 1856, in ACG, 34:3, 73, 76; Lawrence Branch, speaking in the House, December 18, 1856, in ACG, 34:3, 104. 72. Lewis Cass, speaking in the Senate, December 11, 1856, in CG, 34:3, 88, 89, 91; William Carl Klunder, Lewis Cass and the Politics of Moderation (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1996), 267. 73. Ordeal, 398, 451

James Buchanan: Romancing the Union robert e. terrill

James Buchanan is widely recognized as one of our worst presidents. Indeed, he is ranked at the very bottom in a 1994 survey sponsored by the Siena Research Institute, a 1997 study by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a survey of historians that accompanied C-SPAN’s 1999 series American Presidents: Life Portraits, an accompanying survey of C-SPAN viewers, and an October 2000 survey of seventy-eight scholars of history, political science, and law, cosponsored by the Federalist Society and the Wall Street Journal.1 In their 1997 book, Rating the Presidents, William J. Ridings Jr. and Stuart B. McIver elevate Buchanan to forty, out of forty-one, just ahead of Harding, but also note that “Buchanan is one of the most maligned of all the presidents.”2 Charles and Richard Faber, in their The American Presidents Ranked by Performance, published in 2000, give Buchanan the highest marks I was able to find, setting him at number twenty-five, based primarily on his three-way tie for third with George Washington and Harry Truman in the area of foreign relations.3 These survey results are reinforced by the opinions of scholars. Michael J. Birkner, for example, opens his introduction to an edited volume called James Buchanan and the Political Crisis of the 1850s, by noting that “Buchanan is perhaps best remembered, or misremembered, as the weak-kneed, dough-faced president who allowed the South to break up the Union.” A few pages later, he suggests that while “it is extreme to call Buchanan . . .

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American’s worst president, it is true that little went right and much went wrong for President Buchanan, and that many of his troubles he brought on himself.” And among those troubles, apparently, was the fact that, as Birkner puts it, “Politically speaking, Buchanan’s presidency was a disaster.”4 William E. Gienapp notes that “Few presidents have left office with less influence over their party than Buchanan. By his retirement he was truly a man without a party, rejected by virtually everyone and without prestige or influence.”5 Robert E. May reflects that “When it comes to ratings of American chief executives, President James Buchanan occupies a lowly rank.” May acknowledges that “there are dissenting voices such as that of biographer Philip Shriver Klein,” but that “historians long ago reached a consensus that Pennsylvania’s only president did his country a terrible disservice by promoting policies that aggravated the sectional crisis of the 1850s.”6 Allan Nevins notes that “No President ever faced a more difficult task” than did James Buchanan—and also that “None . . . ever faced a terrible crisis with feebler means of dealing with it effectively.”7 Of course, no small part of Buchanan’s troubles stem from the fact that it was his unfortunate fate to preside over national disintegration. It would be a remarkably strong character indeed who could snatch a glowing legacy from the jaws of such an epic disaster. Some (like Allan Nevins) think that Buchanan contributed to the onset of the Civil War; others (like Klein, his most sympathetic biographer) think that Buchanan might actually have helped to delay it. John Updike, who has taken James Buchanan as the subject of one full-length play (as far as I know, never produced) and one novel (actually not about James Buchanan, but about a guy who is trying to write a book about James Buchanan while having an affair with his neighbor’s wife), gives him perhaps the fairest assessment: “Elected amid rising sectionalism to keep the peace for four more years, he performed the job for which he was hired.”8 Probably all of these assessments are partly correct; they are not mutually exclusive, at any rate. It is not my main purpose in this essay to contribute directly to this debate, but rather to suggest that Buchanan’s particular failures as a president were a function of his rhetoric. I begin by reviewing some of the historical assessments of Buchanan’s presidential oratory. I then suggest a modification of Jeffrey K. Tulis’s conception of “rhetoric” to allow a more nuanced assessment of Buchanan’s discourse. Specifically, I suggest that Buchanan romanced the Union, placing it upon an unapproachable pedestal and thus rendering it impervious to rhetorical engagement. In doing so, Buchanan both failed to intervene in the escalating sectional conflict and failed to supply his auditors

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with adequate rhetorical means through which to apprehend and address the national crisis.

rhetorical assessments Evaluations of Buchanan’s eloquence, perhaps not surprisingly, mirror assessments of his presidency. Gienapp notes, for example, that Buchanan was “adept at using his voluminous private correspondence to gain support” but “never displayed particular talent as a public speaker or literary stylist,” lacking “the ability to elevate his thought out of the ordinary channels.” “He produced no ringing documents defending his administration’s policies,” Gienapp continues, “and indeed, in four decades of public service, never coined a memorable phrase or voiced a memorable statement.”9 Roy Franklin Nichols, similarly, notes that Buchanan “was no orator, nor had he talent with words.”10 And even John Updike affirms that during Buchanan’s Senate tenure, “though his intellectual powers must have been then in their prime, he was not known to deliver a single speech remarkable either for eloquence, for potential reasoning, or for valuable practical illustration. He was notably deficient both in ingenuity and in rhetorical brilliancy.”11 Updike goes on to say of John Bassett Moore’s twelve-volume Works of James Buchanan that “Only in an eternal Hell could one read through this shelf of congressional speeches, diplomatic dispatches, Presidential papers, and letters political and personal.”12 For the most part, these materials exhibit a sort of scorecard or accounting-book rhetoric, in which long lists of causes and effects are ticked off in a rather precise, dull, and tedious style. Some historians explicitly emphasize the connection between Buchanan’s weaknesses as a president and his weaknesses as a rhetorician. Nevins, for example, critiques Buchanan’s second annual message to Congress in 1858, delivered as secessionist fever was continuing to build, and argues that “Had Buchanan possessed more imagination, energy, and elevation of outlook, he might have used them to divert the nation’s attention from jarring quarrels to constructive tasks.”13 He recommends that Buchanan, immediately after Lincoln’s election, “should have lost no time . . .—not a day, not an hour—in preparing as eloquent and spirited an appeal to national sentiment, North and South, as he and his aides could pen.”14 But Updike, coming to Buchanan’s defense, quite rightly questions the validity of such critiques, wondering “how real this possibility was, in an age accustomed to a narrowly executive Presidency, before the electronic communications that made it possible for,

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say, a Franklin Roosevelt to rise high above the governmental machinery of Washington.”15 Updike thus foreshadows Tulis’s argument that the “rhetorical presidency and the understanding of American politics that it signifies are twentiethcentury inventions and discoveries,” though Tulis warns that it would be a mistake to account for the rise of the rhetorical presidency merely as a technological effect.16 The advent of the rhetorical presidency represents, instead, Tulis argues, a fundamental shift in conceptions about what it means to govern. Specifically, Tulis argues that the twentieth-century “rhetorical presidency” suspends the president between two constitutions, one consisting of the “core structures established in 1789 and debated during the founding era,” and the other consisting of the “contemporary presidential and public understanding of the character of the constitutional system and of the president’s place in it.”17 The “core structures” that characterized the eighteenthand nineteenth-century presidents, as Tulis describes them, include: protections against demagoguery, the “brakes upon public opinion” inherent in representative government, an independent chief executive, and separation of the branches of government into differing areas of specialty.18 This conception of the presidency constrains presidential messages within the genres of inaugural addresses, proclamations, veto messages, and annual messages to Congress—precisely the material that makes up the bulk of Moore’s twelve volumes. It would be relatively simple work to show that Buchanan viewed the presidency in these terms. Buchanan was something of an antidemagogue, a man suspicious of public opinion but otherwise seemingly uninterested in it. Gienapp, for example, argues that Buchanan “manifested little comprehension of public opinion, lacked the ability to shape and mobilize popular sentiment, and repeatedly failed to anticipate correctly the consequences of his actions.”19 And Philip Klein notes that Buchanan thought private dinners with other politicians were “a better medium for airing his views and putting them into circulation than public speeches or the effusions of a controlled press.”20 For example, Stephen A. Douglas’s arguments against the Lecompton constitution—on the grounds that it was not the bona fide voice of popular sovereignty—left Buchanan famously unimpressed. And Buchanan consistently understood the branches of the federal government to represent entirely separate functions that should not, under threat of ensuing chaos, be mixed. In response to a missive sent by the “commissioners” from the just-seceded South Carolina, for example, who visited Buchanan in January 1861, Buchanan declared that he had “no alternative, as the chief executive

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officer under the Constitution of the United States, but to collect the public revenues and to protect the public property so far as this might be practicable under existing laws. This is still my purpose. My province is to execute, and not to make, the laws. It belongs to Congress, exclusively, to repeal, to modify, or to enlarge their provisions, to meet exigencies as they may occur. I possess no dispensing power.”21

tulis and rhetoric Buchanan’s conception of a severely limited presidency, together with his natural dearth of rhetorical artistry, conspire to render him a representative example of the “prerhetorical presidency.” But modifying Tulis’s conception of rhetoric allows a shift in focus. Specifically, I want to transfer attention away from the genres of rhetoric that Buchanan was led by his times to produce, and toward the conception of his times that might have been produced by Buchanan’s rhetoric. I am not attempting to reverse a cause-and-effect relationship between text and context, but instead to understand text and context as inherently and inexorably connected and thus as two synchronic poles between which a critic might slide her or his lens. In the introductory chapter of The Rhetorical Presidency, Tulis observes that “Rhetorical practice is not merely a variable, it is also an amplification or vulgarization of the ideas that produce it. Political rhetoric,” he continues, “is, simultaneously, a practical result of basic doctrines of governance, and an avenue to the meaning of alternative constitutional understandings.”22 Ideas and doctrines, in this view, exist some place outside of rhetoric, and rhetoric itself is merely a sort of conduit through which these ideas and doctrines are passed. This is a valuable emendation and critique of the view of rhetoric as merely a symptom, but still it is an instrumental view of rhetoric, an understanding of communication that renders it an inert conveyance rather than an architectonic and constitutive political force. Rather than the site wherein ideas and policies are generated, rhetoric is understood as merely the conduit through which they pass on their journey from the mind of the president to the minds of his auditors. This instrumental view of rhetoric is evident, for example, in Tulis’s discussion of Lincoln’s discourse of “silence” prior to his inauguration. Tulis describes five reasons that Lincoln supplied for his reluctance to speak on the key issue of the day before he was inaugurated, perhaps chief among them being an effort to direct the attention of his audience to the “carefully crafted rhetoric” that eventually he would present “officially,” such as

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in his inaugural address. Lincoln’s discourse of silence is thus apprehended as a stratagem, a way to prepare the ground for a future deployment of policies. Tulis is persuasive. But compare Ed Black’s discussion of Lincoln’s efforts in his second inaugural to efface himself from his own text. Some of Black’s insights regarding this instance of rhetorical silence sound remarkably similar to Tulis’s. Black describes Lincoln’s “deliberate self-suppression,” for example, and his “disappearance from his own discourses.”23 But Black goes on to argue that by removing himself, Lincoln invites his audience to apprehend his speeches as the “conveyance of pure argument,” uncorrupted by his own character: “Nothing, no one stands between the auditor and the experiences of the speech’s progression. Lincoln is not there. He has transmuted himself into an instrument.”24 Black attends to this moment of silence not merely or primarily to explicate Lincoln’s rhetorical strategy, nor to honor the artistry of his words, but rather to theorize their possible effects upon an audience. Black argues that Lincoln’s self-suppression “so shaped his audiences that their credulity was tested only by the policies he advanced.”25 Such discourses “compel a reconstitution of our character as ‘auditors,’” forcing upon us a “different perspective”; neither Lincoln’s immediate audience, nor anyone who reads the text, “can understand the second inaugural address without somehow experiencing its perspective.”26 Lincoln’s discourse, Black concludes, “created in his presidential discourses a mind” and invites its audience toward a sharing of that mind. It is not merely conduit or strategy, but is itself constitutive of rhetor and audience. Stephen A. Douglas once famously reminded James Buchanan that he was no Andrew Jackson. And neither, of course, was Buchanan an Abe Lincoln. But Buchanan’s rhetoric did invite its auditors toward sharing a particular perspective—perhaps toward partaking of a certain sort of communal mind. And in that sense, Buchanan’s presidency most certainly was a “rhetorical” one. True, he addressed Congress far more often than he addressed the people; true, he much preferred written communication to oral; true, he was linguistically inelegant. But he was a rhetorical president, and the perspectives that his rhetoric invited its audience to share had undeniable material consequences.

romancing the union Buchanan’s discourse during his presidency necessarily touches on a great many subjects. Arguably, his most important statements are those on foreign policy, as this was particularly important to him and, by some accounts, his

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most significant legacy. But I shall focus on the statements pertaining to that national tragedy that contributes most directly to Buchanan’s low status among our presidents, the fate of the Union during the 1850s. Buchanan’s discourse romances the Union, positioning it as an uncorrupted and idealized object too fragile to be subjected to interrogation, conflict, or indeed even engagement.27 The Union is not a process for Buchanan, nor even a product, but instead a lifeless and inert Platonic form not to be apprehended directly. Both horrified and seduced, Buchanan cannot engage her and yet cannot look away. Thus turned to stone, like a would-be lover after gazing upon the face of a Medusa, Buchanan dithered amid disintegration. There exists in Buchanan’s biography a Victorian tale of virtuous love and tragic separation with remarkable dramatic potential. Any understanding of Buchanan’s relationship to the Union, and thus of the relationship he would foster among his hearers, must begin here. Philip G. Auchampaugh, writing in 1939, begins a two-part essay on Buchanan subtitled “An Inquiry On the Subject of Feminine Influence in the Life of our Fifteenth President,” by arguing that “there are few phases of Buchanan’s life more interesting than the one concerning his attitude towards women,”28 and that this particular relationship seems to have been particularly formative. Klein asserts, indeed, that these events not only “changed the course of James Buchanan’s life” but also “possibly the course of American history.”29 Much of this story must remain forever lost to history, for Buchanan bundled all of the pertinent documents separately from his other papers, and ordered the bundle destroyed, unopened, upon his death. The basic outlines of the narrative can be reconstructed, however. The year was 1818, and James Buchanan was a twenty-seven-year-old single lawyer in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, rising rapidly from his humble beginnings in Stony Batter; he had, as Klein puts it, “a talent for making himself agreeable to families of standing in the town and for raising the hopes of their unmarried daughters.” Ann Coleman was “the belle of the town and the daughter of one of the richest men in the country,” but at twenty-two something of an “Old Maid” by the standards of the time.30 Buchanan’s law partner, Molton C. Rogers, was courting one of Ann’s cousins, and invited Buchanan one evening to serve as Ann’s escort. Ann and James became engaged to be married the following summer, and as Rogers and Ann’s cousin had also become engaged, local gossips began to imagine a double wedding. But ominous clouds lurked about the horizon of these seemingly pleasant and mundane events. For one thing, Ann’s parents were not particularly enthusiastic. Ann’s father, like Buchanan’s, had emigrated from Ireland, but Robert Coleman had become one

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of the nation’s first millionaires and was both proud and jealous of his wealth. He may have heard the whisperings about town that Buchanan was more interested in his money than in his daughter. He was a trustee of Dickinson College, from which Buchanan had once been expelled. And he also knew that Buchanan had once lost three tracts of land in a wager on an election. Together, such revelations surely did little to pad Buchanan’s resume. But this story is perhaps more tragedy than melodrama, its catastrophes the result more of bad decisions than a foreboding mood. The summer after their engagement, Buchanan’s attentions were diverted by the financial crisis of 1819, which, as Klein puts it, “had developed into a nightmare for men of property and the lawyers who handled it.”31 Buchanan suddenly was frantically busy, and had to travel almost constantly back and forth between Lancaster and Philadelphia. The Federalist Party, with which Buchanan was affiliated, was falling apart, and the debates over the Missouri Compromise were wracking the country. Buchanan served on a committee to draft a resolution in opposition to extending slavery into Missouri, and attended numerous public meetings in which these issues were discussed and political connections were made. He did not spend much time in Lancaster, and his absence was duly noted by all concerned. Ann penned a note to Buchanan telling him that she feared he was more interested in her money than in her. This placed Buchanan in something of a double bind, for either continuing to treat the relationship with relative coolness or suddenly showing Ann more attention would be seen as confirmation of Ann’s accusations. So Buchanan did nothing. As is true so often in tragedies, this mistake quickly was followed by a fatal error. Upon returning from one of his frequent out-of-town journeys, he called first not upon Ann Coleman but upon the charming wife of Mr. William Jenkins, who happened to be entertaining her equally charming but unmarried sister, Miss Grace Hubley. Word quickly got back to Ann and when, at length, Buchanan did knock upon Ann’s door, her sister answered and told him: “She is not in to you, sir.”32 Ann broke off the engagement, and traveled to Philadelphia to visit her sister. She left Lancaster on December 4—and died at her sister’s home that night. The attending physician noted that this was the first time he had ever witnessed “hysteria” as a cause of death.33 Buchanan wrote a letter to Robert Coleman in which he said, among other things, that “My prospects are all cut off, and I feel that my happiness will be buried with her in the grave.” He notes, somewhat mysteriously, that “it is now no time for explanation, but the time will come when you will discover that she, as well as I, have been much abused. God forgive the authors

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of it.” He says he has only “one request to make,” and that is for Coleman to “afford me the melancholy pleasure of seeing her body before its interment. I would not for the world be denied this request.” He then makes a second request, though the “misrepresentations which must have been made to you” made him “almost afraid” of doing so: “I would like to follow her remains to the grave as a mourner.” He wishes “to convince the world, and I hope yet to convince you, that she was infinitely dearer to me than life. I may sustain the shock of her death, but I feel that happiness has fled from me forever.”34 Robert Coleman returned the letter to Buchanan, unopened. How deeply must such events have affected young James Buchanan? Nichols suggests that Buchanan used the events to manufacture “a romantic legend” which he shared with others as a means of shielding himself from the truth of his loss. “Ever after,” Nichols continues, “he had the ill equipped bachelor’s eagerness for feminine attention to hide his peculiar lack, and he quite shone in the drawing room.”35 Auchampaugh, as if in agreement, notes that “it has not been difficult to see from the facts . . . that Buchanan had a strong sex impulse.”36 But Auchampaugh also briefly reviews a psychological theory of the day that “neural connections once formed are again called into action by later experiences.” “If one accepts this idea,” he suggests, “a connection can be seen with this tragedy and the one which Buchanan felt was impending in 1860–1861.”37 If we can take seriously Jim Jasinski’s recommendation that “popular literature on the subjects of courtship, seduction, and marriage” can be read “metaphorically in order to understand better the political anxieties” of a particular historical period, how much more attractive is the possibility of reading this bizarre and cautionary tale as a metaphor for Buchanan’s own political anxieties.38 Just as the young lawyer Buchanan turned his attention to matters financial and political while the object of his affection drifted away, so did old President Buchanan search for procedural solutions to the problems of slavery while his priceless and idealized Union drifted toward disintegration. Some Buchanan scholars already have been tempted by this analogy. “He loved the Union as it was then constituted,” argues Auchampaugh, “with the feeling of devotion as strong as that with which he had worshipped the daughter of the great Lancaster ironmonger years before.”39 Auchampaugh also quotes a contemporary of Buchanan’s, who averred that “Mr. Buchanan would have been more of a man with a wife. Understanding the family relation by experience would have made him a broader statesman. He would not have been so cold, and he would then have had better friends.”40 Nichols suggests that “emotionally he had never been perfectly adjusted” after Ann’s

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death. But it is John Updike who has succumbed most fully to this temptation. His entire play, aptly titled Buchanan Dying, consists of Buchanan on his deathbed being visited by a Dickensian array of ghosts from his past. The Ann Coleman/South Carolina allegory provides most of the play’s dramatic movement. For example, Updike manufactures Ann’s letter to Buchanan breaking off their engagement, and then has it read out in place of the actual letter sent to Buchanan by the “commissioners” from the newly seceded state of North Carolina.41 Buchanan’s conceptualization of the Union is important, I think, beyond the mere fact that it drives this central biographical allegory, as seductive as that allegory may be. Auchampaugh notes that Buchanan “exhibited a tendency to place the object of his affections on a pedestal,”42 and Buchanan’s romancing of the Union, as perhaps a representative trope of nineteenth-century presidential discourse, is important because it illustrates a key limitation of both Tulis’s conception of rhetoric and of the prerhetorical presidency. The failure to apprehend rhetoric as the art of public seduction is correlative to the failure to perceive the Union as living, dynamic, and therefore needful of loving engagement rather than emplacement upon a distanced pedestal. The most important address of Buchanan’s presidency probably was his “lame-duck” annual message to Congress, delivered in early December of 1860; accordingly, I will attend carefully to this address. However, only the first few pages of that document address the secession crisis, and it therefore represents too small a sample from which to generalize a theory of Buchanan’s rhetoric. Thus, I begin my analysis with a review of Buchanan’s rhetorical corpus, developing four central themes through which he idealizes the Union: nature, detachment, voting, and family. As this review unfolds, it becomes clear that each of these is a topos of repression, naming a set of motives through which forces potentially harmful to the placid and inert beauty of the Union might be kept at bay.

nature Buchanan was not a religious man; indeed, he struggled with his faith throughout his life, wondering at his inability to experience a legitimate conversion experience. Besides the obligatory calls for the Almighty to keep the United States always under His benevolent gaze, God plays no very dominant role in Buchanan’s public address. Seldom, if ever, does Buchanan call

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upon the citizens to preserve the Union through adherence to God’s law. Nature, however, often is invoked for this purpose. Buchanan repeatedly urges his audiences to assume a passive posture and merely to allow nature to take its course, particularly as regards the subject of slavery. Buchanan’s views on slavery in this regard comport with those of many of his contemporaries, in that he believed that latitude and climate placed absolute limitations on the spread of slavery. In an 1845 Senate speech on the annexation of Texas, for example, he declares that “slavery is destined to exist in Texas, whether we admit her into our Union or not.”43 Two years later, in the “Harvest Home” letter in which he proposed extending the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific, he declares that “it is morally impossible . . . that a majority of the emigrants to that portion of [California] South of 36° 30', which will be chiefly composed of our fellow citizens from the Eastern, Middle & Western States, will ever re-establish slavery within its limits.”44 That nature should be allowed to take its course also is the theme of this assessment of the Lecompton/Topeka controversy concerning the admission of Kansas in his 1858 annual message to Congress: “Left to manage and control its own affairs in its own way, without the pressure of external influence, the revolutionary Topeka organizations and all resistance to the territorial government established by Congress have been finally abandoned. As a natural consequence, that fine Territory now appears to be tranquil and prosperous, and is attracting increasing thousands of immigrants to make it their happy home.”45 The theme reappears in his third annual message in 1859, in which he proclaims that “from natural causes the slavery question will in each case soon virtually settle itself ” and that the admission of Kansas into the union is “a foregone conclusion.”46 The Union, then, can be preserved by bringing the political climate into alignment with natural edicts. This sense of idealized piety toward a natural order also begins to suggest a limitation on presidential influence. If it is only “natural” that slavery should not extend north of 36° 30', and that Kansas should have been admitted as a state under Lecompton, then little is left for the president to do. Buchanan continually engaged in what Philip Klein calls “downgrading the presidency,” releasing the presidency from power and responsibility in inverse proportion to the level of crisis he faced. Inclined to let things run their course toward their natural end, Buchanan could offer little by way of rhetorical direction or, indeed, rhetorical salve. He felt it best to merely stay out of the way, for commitment to any course of action that might impede nature’s progress would betray and endanger the Union.

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detachment Buchanan labored also, in his discourse, to keep the Union safe by insulating it from unwarranted passion or interest. Of course, he was too long in politics to believe that political communication itself should be, or could be, dispassionate. His descriptions of partisan politics contain the familiar militaristic images; in the 1847 “Harvest Home” letter, for example, he rejoices that “the glorious Democracy of ‘Old Berks’ are buckling on their armor & preparing for the approaching contest,” and warns that “in this contest, emphatically, he that is not for us is against us.”47 His public and private political duel with Stephen A. Douglas over the Lecompton constitution is legendary, and his efforts to pass the constitution through the House were aggressive enough to draw the attention of a congressional investigation.48 Nor does Buchanan seem to shy away from brandishing warlike rhetoric when discussing various topics, such as the transcontinental railroad, which in his inaugural address as well as in all four of his annual messages to Congress he justified by reference to the authority given Congress by the Constitution to “appropriate money towards the construction of a military road” for the defense of California and Pacific territories.49 Allan Nevins argues that the “key” to Buchanan’s character “is to be found in a quality not easily explained: in a deep irresolution,”50 but there seems little in Buchanan’s political history to suggest that he would hesitate to wade knee-deep into the blood sport that was nineteenth-century U.S. politics when he felt it necessary or advantageous to do so. It was when speaking of the Union, though, that Buchanan exhibited a desire to curtail passionate arguments at almost any cost. The Union, for Buchanan, could not be sullied as could other political entities, such as mere elections or railroads. For example, in his 1856 response to the “Committee of Notification” which informed him of his nomination as the Democratic candidate for president, Buchanan notes that “Most happy would it be for the country if this long agitation [over slavery] were at an end. During its whole progress it has produced no practical good to any human being, whilst it has been the source of great and dangerous evils. It has alienated and estranged one portion of the Union from the other, and has even seriously threatened its very existence.”51 Note that this statement, like others, is ideologically opaque. Buchanan does not express a desire to resolve one way or the other the issues which are fomenting the agitation, nor indeed to resolve them at all, but merely to quell the excitement—to bring the agitation to an end. In his second annual message to Congress, he discusses the Lecompton controversy by noting that “it is to be lamented that a question

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so insignificant, when viewed in its practical effects on the people of Kansas, whether decided one way or the other, should have kindled such a flame of excitement throughout the country.”52 The questions themselves—whether Kansas should be a slave or a free state, or whether Lecompton represented the true sentiments of the population of Kansas—are not as significant to Buchanan as the uproar that they have created. This disturbance can only “retard” the “material progress” of the people of the territories, and “divert them from their useful employments, by prematurely exciting angry political contests among themselves, for the benefit of aspiring leaders.”53 Again, the most significant danger stems not from the specific qualities of the controversy, but rather from the very existence of public controversy itself. Significantly, this sense of cool detachment seems to extend to Buchanan’s conception of the role of the president. Just as the Union cannot be besmirched by controversy, so too Buchanan cannot allow himself to swim in the mire. Repeatedly, and throughout his discourse, he energetically excuses himself from the field of action. Most often, he claims to be unable to act at all—the Constitution has granted only Congress, or the judiciary, the power to do so. The Constitution, then, is cited in defense of executive disinterest. For example, in the “Silliman” letter, written in August 1857, to “a group of clergyman, Yale professors, and citizens of Connecticut” who “had become alarmed at the large armament in Kansas marshaled against the free-state city of Lawrence,”54 Buchanan admits that it is “quite true that a controversy had previously arisen respecting the validity of the election of members of the Territorial legislature and of the laws passed by them,” but goes on to note that “at the time I entered upon my official duties, Congress had recognized this legislature in different enactments. . . . Under these circumstances,” he asks, “what was my duty?”55 And in this same letter Buchanan describes a Congress that can, at best, occupy a merely reactive role: “illegal and dangerous combinations, such as that of the Topeka convention, will not be disturbed, unless they shall attempt to perform some act which will bring them into actual collision with the Constitution and the laws.”56 In his first annual message to Congress, and again addressing the Lecompton controversy, Buchanan quotes from the Constitution in delimiting his role, declaring that “it was far from my intention to interfere with the decision of the people of Kansas, either for or against slavery” and that being merely “intrusted [sic] with the duty of taking ‘care that the laws be faithfully executed,’ my only desire was that the people of Kansas should furnish to Congress the evidence required by the organic act, whether for or against slavery; and in this manner smooth their passage

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into the Union.”57 The situation in Utah was accorded the same treatment: “With the religious opinions of the Mormons,” Buchanan declares, “as long as they remained mere opinions, however deplorable in themselves and revolting to the moral and religious sentiments of all Christendom, I had no right to interfere. Actions alone, when in violation of the Constitution and laws of the United States, become the legitimate subjects for the jurisdiction of the civil magistrate.”58 On July 9, 1860, Buchanan spoke to a crowd that had gathered before the White House to hear his views on the nomination of his vice president, John C. Breckinridge, for president by a Democratic Party faction. Breckinridge had been nominated by the southern Democrats who had broken up the regular Democratic Convention in Charleston. Buchanan seems either unwilling or unable to perceive the degree to which the state of the Union had disintegrated, blaming the break up of the Democratic Convention, for example, not on sectional tensions but on the “abandonment of the old Congressional convention or caucus.”59 He also reiterated his views on Kansas-Nebraska and Lecompton, though by now these issues had been superseded in importance by others: “I most cheerfully admit that Congress has no right to pass any law to establish, impair, or abolish slavery in the Territories. Let this principle of non-intervention be extended to the Territorial legislatures,” he continues, “and let it be declared that they in like manner have no power to establish, impair or destroy slavery, and then the controversy is in effect ended. That is all that is required at present, and I verily believe all that will ever be required.”60 Like Buchanan’s rhetorical commitment to natural processes, his commitment to dispassionate detachment encourages a passive political posture. The issues that threatened the Union could not be discussed without considerable emotional involvement—as Buchanan well knew—so by bracketing such involvement from public debate Buchanan effectively bracketed himself. I do not mean to attribute to Buchanan a conscious intention in this regard that I cannot confirm. But certainly his repeated calls for detached discussion in a climate of escalating emotional tension kept him from being able to participate effectively in public debates over the most significant issues of his time.

voting For Buchanan, a free election represents the single most important institution through which to achieve the detached and impartial judgment he seems

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to seek. In the face of the vox populi, all the irrational chattering of misplaced emotionalism must cease. The ballot box, for Buchanan, is the mechanism that connects the Constitution to the will of the people; if the Union sanctioned through that Constitution is to be saved, and if it is to be saved through the will of its inhabitants, then it must be saved through voting. At the same time, the ballot box also serves as an insulator, keeping inappropriate emotions from leaking into, and thus spoiling, public debate. Buchanan makes these connections explicit in his inaugural address. “We have recently passed through a presidential contest in which the passions of our fellow-citizens were excited to the highest degree by questions of deep and vital importance,” he points out, “but when the people proclaimed their will, the tempest at once subsided, and all was calm. The voice of the majority, speaking in the manner prescribed by the Constitution, was heard, and instant submission followed.”61 The national issue that provided Buchanan with the best opportunities to expound upon the palliative powers of the ballot box was the Lecompton fiasco. In 1856, Buchanan supported Douglas’s doctrine of “popular sovereignty”; in his response to the “notification” committee informing him of his nomination, for example, Buchanan explains that the “Nebraska-Kansas act does no more than give the force of law to this elementary principle of selfgovernment [popular sovereignty], declaring it to be ‘the true intent and meaning of this act not to legislate slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States.’”62 Douglas was soon to break ranks with Buchanan over this issue, of course, with Douglas declaring that the proslavery Lecompton constitution was not the true voice of the people. Buchanan, as David Zarefsky has pointed out, saw immediate submission of the Lecompton constitution as a way to “remove the Kansas question from the public forum”63 and thus quiet debate; Buchanan was not moved by Douglas’s insistence that the Lecompton constitution was perhaps legal but certainly not valid. But Buchanan’s rhetoric suggests more than merely a procedural fixation; he elevates the act of voting itself to nearly godlike status. The Union might be preserved if it submitted to the outcome of a vote—it mattered not what the particular outcome was, merely that it was appreciated as properly authoritative. “Let the blame fall upon the heads of the guilty,” Buchanan told the Connecticut citizens in the “Silliman” letter of August 15, 1857, regarding the refusal of the antislavery forces to send delegates to Lecompton and their establishment of a rival convention at Topeka. Buchanan was compelled to send troops to Kansas, he explains, because a “portion of the people of Kansas, unwilling to trust to the

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ballot-box—the certain American remedy for the redress of grievances—undertook to create an independent government for themselves.”64 This was “a fair opportunity . . . presented for all the qualified resident citizens of the Territory, to whatever organization they might have previously belonged, to participate in the election, and to express their opinions at the ballot box on the question of slavery. But numbers of lawless men still continued to resist the regular territorial government.”65 Again, it seems unimportant to Buchanan what the outcome of the vote may be; it is the process itself that might preserve the Union. In his second annual message, delivered to Congress on December 6, 1858, he reiterates that “This refusal to vote has been the prolific source of all the evils which have followed,” and that the Topeka organization has been “finally abandoned” once the population of Kansas was “left to manage and control its own affairs in its own way, without the pressure of external influence.”66 Even in January 1861, after South Carolina had seceded from the Union, Buchanan did not lose faith in the restorative powers of the popular voice. Secession is the result, he is “firmly convinced,” of a “misapprehension at the south of the sentiments of the majority in several of the northern States. Let the question be transferred from political assemblies to the ballotbox,” he continues, “and the people themselves would speedily redress the serious grievances which the south have [sic] suffered.”67 Buchanan’s unyielding faith in the ballot box as a site wherein the Union might be saved is almost bizarre given that the results of the 1860 election were themselves responsible for a precipitous rise in sectional tension. And while his commitments to nature and to detachment imply an attenuated role for the president in times of crisis, his commitment to voting as the overriding mechanism through which the Constitution is given voice pushes the president’s relationship with the Union dangerously close to dysfunction. It is one thing to imply that the Union is under the sway of natural forces, but quite another to say that the president has no influence that might—or should—disrupt the tally of the ballots. If fashioning a passive role for the Union was inappropriate, fashioning a passive role for the presidency was a recipe for chaos.

family The potential for dysfunction in the passive relationship that Buchanan encourages between the president and the Union is exacerbated by the fact that in Buchanan’s discourse the Union is frequently framed through family metaphors. Specifically, this family is closely associated with slavery. Indeed, for

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Buchanan, it seems that the Union is the master–slave relationship, so that a disruption of that relationship signifies a disruption of the Union itself. The connection is perhaps most clearly seen in his first annual message to Congress, delivered on December 8, 1857. Defending the plan to submit a constitution for ratification by the people of Kansas Territory in two versions, “with slavery” and “without slavery,” Buchanan argues—contra Douglas—that the plan is in accordance with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which had organized the territories in 1854, because that Act leaves the people of the territory “perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way.”68 Performing an inventive bit of rhetorical analysis, Buchanan neatly installs the slavery question firmly within the domestic sphere: “According to the plain construction of the sentence, the words ‘domestic institutions’ have a direct as they have an appropriate reference to slavery. ‘Domestic institutions’ are limited to the family. The relations between master and slave and a few others are ‘domestic institutions,’ and are entirely distinct from institutions of a political character.”69 The theme reemerges in his third annual message to Congress of December 19, 1859, when he warns that reopening the African slave trade would mean “the introduction of wild, heathen and ignorant barbarians among the sober, orderly, and quiet slaves whose ancestors have been on the soil for several generations,” and thus make it likely that the “feeling of reciprocal dependence and attachment which now exists between master and slave would be converted into mutual distrust and hostility.”70 Such a disruption of the domestic sphere would signal the disruption of the Union. This family might be disrupted from without as well as from within; any disruption of the natural and harmonious master/slave relationship might signal the end of the Union, and thus the domestic sphere must be protected at all costs. In his statement to the notification committee in 1856, for example, Buchanan invokes explicitly familial metaphors when he laments that the “agitation of the question of domestic slavery has too long distracted and divided the people of this Union and alienated their affections from each other.”71 He promises that, “during the single term I shall remain in office,” he would use “all the power and influence Constitutionally possessed by the Executive . . . to restore the same harmony among the sister States which prevailed before this apple of discord, in the form of slavery agitation, had been cast into their midst. Let the members of the family abstain from intermeddling with the exclusive domestic concerns of each other,” he went on, “and cordially unite on the basis of perfect equality among themselves, in promoting the great national objects of common interest to all, and the good work will be instantly accomplished.”72

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In his inaugural address he again relies upon explicit domestic imagery to observe that the issue has “alienated and estranged the people of the sister States from each other, and has even seriously endangered the very existence of the Union.”73 Buchanan further emphasizes the sanctity of the domestic sphere, and further divides it from the political, by warning that “this question of domestic slavery is of far graver importance than any mere political question, because, should the agitation continue, it may eventually endanger the personal safety of a large portion of our countrymen where the institution exists. In that event, no form of government, however admirable in itself, and however productive of material benefits, can compensate for the loss of peace and domestic security around the family altar.”74 And in his third annual message to Congress, of December 19, 1859, about two months after John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Buchanan warns that “If the peace of the domestic fireside throughout these States should ever be invaded—if the mothers of families within this extensive region should not be able to retire to rest at night without suffering dreadful apprehensions of what may be their own fate and that of their children before the morning—it would be vain to recount to such a people the political benefits which result to them from the Union.”75 But he professes to “indulge in no such gloomy forebodings” and is hopeful that “the events at Harper’s Ferry” will cause people “to pause and reflect upon the possible peril to their cherished institutions” and thus “will be the means, under Providence, of allaying the existing excitement and preventing further outbreaks of a similar character.76 This image of menaced domesticity is perhaps presented most strongly in the speech that Buchanan delivered to the crowd at the White House on July 9, 1860, after the nomination of Breckinridge. He warns that the “division of the great Democratic party, should it continue, would rend asunder one of the most powerful links which bind the Union together,” but is peculiarly optimistic that the “present issue is transitory, and will speedily pass away.” The most pressing danger involves the possibility that “Northern agitation and fanaticism shall proceed so far as to render the domestic firesides of the South insecure, then, and not till then, will the Union be in danger. A united Northern Democracy will present a wall of fire against such a catastrophe!”77 For Buchanan, then, the Union is figured as a political family constituted by the master–slave relationship and thus threatened by antislavery forces. To disrupt those “domestic” relations is to disrupt the Union: the Union is not merely like a family, it is a family. Buchanan’s role is to protect that family from those forces by gallantly protecting it from the contentious world of

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politics. And yet he cannot assume this gallant role, because he has rendered himself passive. Through his familial discourse of Union, Buchanan has created a role for the president that he himself cannot fulfill.

final message Having thus surveyed Buchanan’s presidential discourse to discern certain characteristic tendencies, I can now turn my attention to his final annual message to Congress. In the months leading up to this address, President James Buchanan was a busy, if somewhat distracted, man. In May, the Democratic Convention had broken up in Charleston. In June, Buchanan was host to “a large delegation of Japanese dignitaries who had come to the United States for the signing of the first commercial treaty to be negotiated by this mysterious Oriental Empire.”78 Later that month, the Democrats again imploded, this time in Baltimore; eventually, in separate conventions, they nominated both Stephen A. Douglas and John C. Breckinridge for president. In September, the Prince of Wales visited Washington, D.C., prompting a whirlwind of high society activities that distracted Buchanan sufficiently to motivate him to issue an edict banning dancing in the White House.79 In November, the day after Lincoln’s election, federal troops from Fort Moultrie were barred from accessing supplies from a private wharf in Charleston’s harbor. On November 10, Senator James Chestnut of South Carolina resigned, followed immediately by his colleague James Hammond. On November 13, Robert Toombs of Georgia urged the state legislature to “Withdraw yourselves” from the Union, and to “make another war of independence” if the northern abolitionists objected. On December 3, 1860, Buchanan sent his “lame duck” fourth annual message to Congress. It is a curious address, bringing into collusion each of the four themes I have discussed and, thus, proving rather spectacularly illsuited to the moment. It is a characteristically lengthy document, and most of it is taken up with a rehearsal of various foreign relations coups and setbacks and settlings of accounts. These are relevant in that they suggest the direction of the president’s attention, but I want to concentrate particularly on the sections of the speech that address directly the domestic secession crisis. After noting that the country is “eminently prosperous in all its material interests,” Buchanan asks with alarming understatement why “discontent now so extensively prevails?” The answer is not slavery, nor the recent troubled election, but the agitation itself: “The long and intemperate inter-

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ference of the northern people with the question of slavery in the southern States has at length produced its natural effects.”80 As Buchanan develops this theme, the opening paragraphs of his message exhibit a progressive and almost cinematic narrowing of scope, from the national political crisis down to a portrait of menaced domestic tranquility. “The immediate peril arises,” Buchanan notes, “from the fact that the incessant and violent agitation of the slavery question has at length produced its malign influence on the slaves, and inspired them with vague notions of freedom. Hence a sense of security no longer exists around the family altar. This feeling of peace at home has given place to apprehensions of servile insurrections. Many a matron throughout the South retires at night in dread of what may befall herself and her children before the morning.”81 Here, at the family hearth, is where the seeds of secession are first fertilized, for “should this apprehension of domestic danger, whether real or imaginary, extend, and intensify itself, until it shall pervade the masses of the southern people, then disunion will become inevitable.”82 After a brief review of the “five and twenty years the agitation at the North against slavery has been incessant,”83 Buchanan’s comments on the importance of a dispassionate public sphere suggest the intimate connection with domesticity—the crisis could be removed from public discussion if citizens attended only to matters of directly personal importance: “How easy would it be for the American people to settle the slavery question forever, and to restore peace and harmony to this distracted country! They, and they alone, can do it. All that is necessary to accomplish the object, and all for which the slave States have ever contended, is to be let alone and permitted to manage their domestic institutions in their own way.”84 The only way for citizens to participate in public debate is through the insulating mechanism of the ballot box. This mechanism overrides the president’s influence, for if the vote provides the only way to quiet sectional tensions, then Buchanan, or any president, can do little to mend or to rend the Union: “Wisely limited and restrained as is his power under our Constitution and laws, he alone can accomplish but little for good or for evil on such a momentous question.”85 Somewhat paradoxically, because in Buchanan’s view the powers of the president are so severely limited, the voice of the people as expressed in a presidential election is itself also limited in its importance: “the election of any one of our fellow-citizens to the office of the President does not of itself afford just cause for dissolving the Union.”86 Like other apparent paradoxes in Buchanan’s discourse, this one is resolved by noting the conception of the Union that Buchanan

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is developing. Its survival is of the utmost and governing importance; the Union is untouchable and inscrutable, and attempts to engage it always are dangerous. Neither the president, in following the constitutional laws, nor the people, by fulfilling their constitutional obligations, can do anything to imperil its sanctity. If Lincoln were to “invade” the constitutional rights of the South, then that might be cause for “revolutionary resistance,” but “he is no more than the chief executive officer of the government” charged “not to make but to execute the laws” and, thus, “must necessarily be conservative.”87 Lincoln, therefore, cannot single-handedly usher in Armageddon, and the “day of evil may never come unless we shall rashly bring it upon ourselves.”88 The potential power of the vote is further limited, for even laws and policies that have been popularly endorsed at the ballot box can be erased through the power of the Constitution. The territorial prohibitions of slavery in Kansas, for example, are “plainly violating the rights of property secured by the Constitution,” they “will surely be declared void by the judiciary,” and all state or territorial laws passed in defiance of the Fugitive Slave Law have “been passed in violation of the federal Constitution” and “are therefore null and void.”89 Clearly, “it will be the duty of the next President, as it has been my own, to act with vigor in executing this supreme law against the conflicting enactments of State legislatures. Should he fail in the performance of this high duty, he will then have manifested a disregard of the Constitution and laws, to the great injury of the people of nearly one half of the States of the Union.”90 Buchanan warns that unless state legislatures “repeal their unconstitutional and obnoxious enactments,” and thus “without unnecessary delay” bring their state laws into alignment with the Constitution as interpreted in the Dred Scott decision, “it is impossible for any human power to save the Union.”91 Indeed, if this action is not taken, then “the injured States, after having first used all peaceful and constitutional means to obtain redress, would be justified in revolutionary resistance to the government of the Union.”92 Ultimately, it is alignment with the Constitution which can save the Union; the Constitution is, for Buchanan, natural, disinterested, operationalized through the vote, and ascendant over the domestic sphere. These remarks are prefatory to the most curious and problematic section of Buchanan’s fourth annual message. He notes that “it has been claimed within the last few years that any State, whenever this shall be its sovereign will and pleasure, may secede from the Union in accordance with the Constitution, and without any violation of the constitutional rights of the other

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members of the Confederacy.”93 This argument Buchanan denies, for it promotes a Union of “many petty, jarring, and hostile republics, each one retiring from the Union without responsibility whenever any sudden excitement might impel them to such a course.”94 Quoting extensively from both Jackson’s and Madison’s renunciations of the theory of nullification, and from both the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, Buchanan argues that the Union was “intended to be perpetual, and not to be annulled at the pleasure of any one of the contracting parties.” The states are provided with a mechanism for redress against the federal government—revolution. And, for Buchanan, “secession is neither more nor less than revolution.”95 Having thus established that the states have no constitutional right to secede, Buchanan then establishes that neither the president nor Congress has any constitutional authority to stop them. There currently is no federal authority in South Carolina, Buchanan notes, and thus the hands of the federal government are tied. There are no obstacles that “lie in the way of executing the laws for the collection of the customs,” so these will continue to be collected; and though “it is not believed that any attempt will be made to expel the United States . . . by force” from the forts at Charleston, Buchanan reveals that Robert Anderson “has received orders to act strictly on the defensive” should any such attack occur. “Apart from the execution of the laws,” however, “so far as this may be practicable, the Executive has no authority to decide what shall be the relations between the federal government and South Carolina.” Thus, in characteristic Buchananian fashion, he excuses himself from the conversation: “It is . . . my duty to submit to Congress the whole question in all its bearings.”96 However, lest Congress harbor any fantasies about being able to “coerce a State into submission which is attempting to withdraw or has actually withdrawn from the Confederacy,” he states that “after much serious reflection, I have arrived at the conclusion that no such power has been delegated to Congress or to any other department of the federal government.”97 Indeed, even if such power were available, it would be unwise to deploy it. For the “fact is,” Buchanan concludes, “that our Union rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war. If it cannot live in the affections of the people it must one day perish.”98 But at the same time, “We should reflect that, under this free government, there is an incessant ebb and flow in public opinion. The slavery question, like everything human, will have its day,” and it would be a grave mistake to destroy the Union based upon so transient a thing as public opinion. He then finishes this section of the message with a proposal for a constitutional

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amendment that would: (1) recognize the right of property in slaves in slave states, (2) extend this protection to the territories, (3) recognize the validity of the Fugitive Slave Law and render all oppositional state laws null and void. Buchanan pleads that such an amendment “ought to be tried in a spirit of conciliation before any of these States shall separate themselves from the Union,”99 but it is difficult to see how an amendment scented so strongly by magnolias and juleps could have been made palatable to northerners. And, again, the proposed amendment seeks to maintain the Union by resolving three of the central points of controversy through explicit submission to the ultimate authority of the Constitution.

conclusion At the 1856 Democratic Convention in Cincinnati, Jeremiah Black, who became Buchanan’s attorney general, felt it necessary to defend Buchanan’s bachelor status. At the conclusion of the seventeenth ballot, in which Buchanan finally achieved the nomination, Black rose, in part, “to vindicate Pennsylvania’s favorite son against the charge of having failed in that higher duty which every man owes to himself, to society and to the sweeter sex. Mr. Buchanan, we confess, is a bachelor. But the reason is a complete vindication as will, I am sure, satisfy every gentleman here present. It is this—as soon as James Buchanan was old enough to marry, he became wedded to the Constitution of his country, and the laws of Pennsylvania do not allow a man to have more than one wife.”100 The Constitution does enjoy a privileged status within Buchanan’s discourse. It provides the mechanism through which the purity of the Union, and of Buchanan himself, must be maintained, and it is the ultimate authority under which the voice of the people, and the voice of Buchanan, must submit. But the most significant matrimonial couple here is not Buchanan and the Constitution but rather Buchanan and the Union; the Constitution plays rather the role of justice of the peace. The marriage between Union and Buchanan is a peculiarly chaste one, in which both parties are assigned rather passive roles. Proceeding according to the dictates of nature, for example, is one way to preserve the placid calm that is essential to the health of the Union. Neither the Union nor Buchanan is to be proactive in this regard, except to seek out these dictates and then to abide by them. Mutual disinterest also is to be maintained, so that neither Buchanan nor the object of his affections are tarred by the brush of excessive passion. A strict submission to

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the vote is to be prized, also, by both parties, but only to the extent that the people’s discordant voices are regulated by the dictates of the Constitution. And, finally, the Union should be firmly insulated from the rough-and-tumble political world; it is domestic in character, and thus its harmonies must be protected against the political world by a wall of fire. As the “irrepressible conflict” escalated, Buchanan was powerless to address it. The Union was on an unapproachable pedestal and the president was a powerless prop. Constrained by an unbridgeable romantic distance, he could do nothing but watch while the Union dissolved. Buchanan’s rhetoric may be typical, in many ways, of nineteenth-century presidential discourse. Certainly it embodies many of the characteristics of the “pre-rhetorical” presidency as outlined by Tulis. Tulis argues that Lincoln, for example, though a far more vigorous president than Buchanan, still was constrained by the rhetorical limitations of the nineteenth century. A cursory perusal of Lincoln’s first inaugural shows that he does, indeed, sound many of the same themes that characterize Buchanan’s rhetoric. But Lincoln also provides this analogy: “A husband and wife may be divorced, and go out of the presence, and beyond the reach of each other; but the different parts of our country cannot do this. They cannot but remain face to face; and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them.”101 Neither Buchanan, nor the Union he constructs, would allow for hostile intercourse to taint the romantic mood. But in the rhetorical universe Lincoln is constructing, the communicative relationship itself is to be privileged; this relationship may not always be genteel, as Lincoln acknowledges, but the important thing is to acknowledge that the relationship always must continue. That James Buchanan badly underestimated the extent to which the Union was in danger of disintegration is clear, but of equal importance to scholars interested in public discourse is the fact that Buchanan’s misjudgments stem from his underestimation of the power of rhetoric. He perceived the ideal political sphere as a fragile realm easily endangered by emotional and ornamental excess, so he attempted to insulate the Union by framing it within a discourse of natural, reasonable, and procedural domesticity. He made use of a highly disciplined mode of rhetoric to attempt to discipline an increasingly unruly Union; his public discourse was disinterested and purified to the point of banality, a rhetoric of quiet and safety wholly unable to address an exigency of crisis and passion. Rhetorical effectiveness requires risk; so does a conception of rhetoric as constitutive and architectonic. An entirely instrumental conception of rhetoric is a safe one, since it keeps the bogeys of emotion and desire at bay by imagining the public sphere as a rational

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realm. But such a conception of rhetoric also, as Buchanan’s discourse amply demonstrates, severely limits its potential. If rhetoric has no power to reshape ideas of what is “natural,” if it is stripped down to mere rationality, if it is disciplined under the sign of popular opinion or unalienable authority, and if it is allowed only to inhabit the domestic sphere in the hope of holding public debate in quarantine—then rhetoric can offer little to a people on the brink of disintegration. Thus it is that Buchanan’s lack of rhetorical skill does not render him useless to rhetoricians. He was governed by the norms of nineteenthcentury presidential discourse, and Buchanan’s biography and his historical circumstances, together with his minimal rhetorical competence, conspired to bring the potential dangers of these norms into rather stark relief. Rhetoric is not easily tamed, and discourse which appears to be tamed can present to its practitioners and to its auditors only the illusion of a natural, rational, disciplined, and domesticated public sphere. Such illusions do not only obscure the inevitable crises of democratic life, but also offer to the public some inventional resources that are woefully inadequate to address those crises when they can no longer be ignored. James Buchanan, then, provides a powerful cautionary tale: all presidencies are rhetorical, even those in the nineteenth century, and the failure to recognize this fact can severely cripple our ability to sustain a robust democracy into the twenty-first century.

notes 1. All of these surveys are available online, respectively: http://www.udayton.edu/~polsci/siena.htm; http://www.isi.org/whatsnew/presresults.asp; http://www.americanpresidents.org/survey/historians/overall.asp; http://www.americanpresidents.org/survey/viewer/overall.asp; http://www.opinionjournal.com/hail/rankings.html. 2. William J. Ridings Jr. and Stuart B. McIver, Rating the Presidents: A Ranking of U.S. Leaders, from the Great and Honorable to the Dishonest and Incompetent (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1997), 98. 3. Charles F. Faber and Richard B. Faber, The American Presidents Ranked by Performance (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2000), 12. 4. Michael J. Birkner, “Introduction: Getting to Know James Buchanan, Again,” in James Buchanan and the Political Crisis of the 1850s, ed. Michael J. Birkner (Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1996), 17, 29. 5. William E. Gienapp, “‘No Bed of Roses’: James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, and Presidential Leadership in the Civil War Era,” in James Buchanan and the Political Crisis of the 1850s, 110.

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6. Robert E. May, “James Buchanan, the Neutrality Laws, and American Invasions of Nicaragua,” in James Buchanan and the Political Crisis of the 1850s, 123. 7. Allan Nevins, Prologue to Civil War, 1859–1861, vol. 2 of The Emergence of Lincoln (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950), 340. 8. John Updike, Buchanan Dying: A Play (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 210. Updike’s comments are part of a lengthy and quasi-scholarly commentary included as an appendix to the play. See also: John Updike, Memories of the Ford Administration: A Novel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). 9. Gienapp, “James Buchanan,” 117. 10. Roy Franklin Nichols, The Disruption of American Democracy (New York: The Free Press, 1948), 83. 11. Updike, Buchanan Dying, 248. 12. Ibid., 198. 13. Allan Nevins, Douglas, Buchanan, and Party Chaos, 1857–1859, vol. 1 of The Emergence of Lincoln (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950), 422. 14. Nevins, Prologue, 361. 15. Updike, Buchanan Dying, 204. 16. Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 5, 14. 17. Ibid., 18. 18. Ibid., 27–45. 19. Gienapp, “James Buchanan,” 119. 20. Philip Shriver Klein, President James Buchanan: A Biography (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962), 204. 21. John Bassett Moore, ed., The Works of James Buchanan: Comprising his Speeches, State Papers, and Private Correspondence, vol. 11 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1910), 95–96. 22. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency, 14. 23. Edwin Black, “The Ultimate Voice of Lincoln,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 3 (2000): 50. 24. Ibid., 51, 54. 25. Ibid., 51. 26. Ibid., 55–56. 27. Rhetorical scholars have vigorously investigated the impulse to frame various central tenets of American political life as fragile or feminine. Some examples include: Michael Calvin McGee, “The Origins of ‘Liberty’: A Feminization of Power,” Communication Monographs 47 (1980): 23–45; Robert L. Ivie, “The Ideology of Freedom’s ‘Fragility’ in American Foreign Policy Argument,” Journal of the American Forensic Association 24 (1987): 27–36; James Jasinski, “The Feminization of Liberty, Domesticated Virtue, and the Reconstitution of Power and Authority in Early American Political Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 79 (1993): 146–64. 28. Philip G. Auchampaugh, “James Buchanan, The Bachelor of the White House: An Inquiry on the Subject of Feminine Influence in the Life of our Fifteenth President,” Tyler’s Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine 20 (1939): 155. Auchampaugh’s essay appears in two parts in the journal, in subsequent issues within the same volume; the complete pagination is: 154–66, 218–34. 29. Klein, President James Buchanan, 31. 30. Ibid., 28. 31. Ibid., 30.

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32. Auchampaugh, “James Buchanan,” 159. 33. Klein, President James Buchanan, 32. 34. George Ticknor Curtis, Life of James Buchanan: Fifteenth President of the United States (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1883), 18–19. 35. Nichols, Disruption, 88. 36. Auchampaugh, “James Buchanan,” 163. 37. Ibid., 162. 38. Jasinski, “Feminization of Liberty,” 149, 159. 39. Auchampaugh, “James Buchanan,” 162. 40. Ibid., 159. 41. Updike, Buchanan Dying, 137–39. 42. Auchampaugh, “James Buchanan,” 158–59. 43. Moore, Works, 6:107. 44. Ibid., 7:387. 45. Ibid., 10:236. 46. Ibid., 10:342. 47. Ibid., 7:385. 48. “On March 5, 1859, the House adopted a resolution to investigate whether the president had tried to influence the votes of Congressmen on the English Bill by improper means” (Klein, President James Buchanan, 338). The English Bill was a scheme (or a compromise, depending on one’s political leanings) that assured that Kansas would come into the Union under the proslavery Lecompton constitution. The investigative committee, headed by John Covode of Pennsylvania, produced a widely circulated and ponderous volume that suggested that Buchanan was a puppet controlled by the slave power. It did not, however, recommend any resolutions of impeachment or censure. 49. Moore, Works, 10:112. See also 10:154–55; 10:273; 11:39. 50. Nevins, Party Chaos, 61. 51. Moore, Works, 10:83. 52. Ibid., 10:238. 53. Ibid., 10:241. 54. Nichols, Disruption, 123. 55. Moore, Works, 10:119. 56. Ibid., 10:121. 57. Ibid., 10:147. 58. Ibid., 10:152. 59. Ibid., 10:458. 60. Ibid., 10:462. 61. Ibid., 10:105. 62. Ibid., 10:83. 63. David Zarefsky, Lincoln, Douglas, and Slavery: In the Crucible of Public Debate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 13. 64. Moore, Works, 10:120. 65. Ibid., 10:121. 66. Ibid., 10:236. 67. Ibid., 11:97. 68. Ibid., 10:149. 69. Ibid., 10:149. 70. Ibid., 10:345–46. 71. Ibid., 10:82.

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72. Ibid., 10:84. 73. Ibid., 10:108. 74. Ibid., 10:109. 75. Ibid., 10:340–41. 76. Ibid., 10:341. 77. Ibid., 10:463. 78. Klein, President James Buchanan, 348. 79. Buchanan also ordered his niece and First Lady, Miss Harriet Lane, to remove her portraits from the rooms that the prince would occupy, apparently fearing that her attractive visage would distract young Edward Albert from important affairs of state. It seems that Buchanan was justified in his worry, for according to some reports the prince was somewhat smitten with the lovely Miss Lane. At any rate, this incident supplies further anecdotal evidence concerning Buchanan’s distaste for any mixing of emotions and politics (Klein, President James Buchanan, 350). 80. Moore, Works, 11:7. 81. Ibid., 11:7–8. 82. Ibid., 11:8. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid., 11:9. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid., 11:10. 89. Ibid., 11:10–11. 90. Ibid., 11:12. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid. 94. Ibid., 11:13–14. 95. Ibid., 11:17. 96. Ibid., 11:18. 97. Ibid., 11:19. 98. Ibid., 11:20. 99. Ibid., 11:24–25. 100. Official Proceedings of the National Democratic Convention held in Cincinnati, June 2–6, 1856 (Cincinnati, Ohio: Enquirer Company Steam Printing Establishment, 1856), 59. 101. Lincoln’s first inaugural is quoted in full in Marie Hochmuth Nichols, “Lincoln’s First Inaugural,” in Landmark Essays on Rhetorical Criticism, ed. Thomas W. Benson (Davis, Calif.: Hermagoras Press, 1993), 66.

Andrew Johnson and the Politics of Character stephen howard browne

By late fall of 1866, the usually staid Atlantic Monthly had had enough. Benefit of the doubt had been extended; novel circumstances acknowledged; regional habits respected. But this was too much: President Andrew Johnson—this “accident of an accident”—had just finished a three thousandmile journey—ostensibly to commemorate a statue to Stephen Douglas in Chicago—and thus plead his case to the American people. It proved in the end an exercise so futile, so embarrassing, so lacking in any sense of dignity or decorum, that it served only to lower the new president into the “grave of his own reputation.” And no clearer evidence of the premature death of Andrew Johnson could be summoned than in the rhetorical disaster with which the tour was attended. “His speeches on the route,” the magazine reported, “were a volcanic outbreak of vulgarity, conceit, bombast, scurrility, ignorance, insolence, brutality, and balderdash.” The view was hardly isolated: “Touched with insanity, corrupted with lust, stimulated with drink,” The Independent warned, “let the President of the United States, standing for a half hour by the grave’s edge, calm his blood and chasten his thoughts, till he can reflect . . . how a chief magistrate who betrays his country shall become a handful of dishonored dust.” James Russell Lowell imagined the tour an “indecent orgy,” Thomas Nast skewered Johnson in the pages of Harper’s, and even General Grant, his own traveling companion, murmured, “I am disgusted at hearing a man make speeches on the way to his own funeral.”1

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How Johnson managed to transform himself from an object of regard and warm expectations into a target of the nation’s first executive impeachment proceedings is of course an exceedingly complex story, and I have no wish to rehearse it here. I do hope to sketch one chapter in that story by attending to Johnson’s oratorical performances, specifically his boozy vice-presidential inaugural address, his scandalous speech of February 22, 1866, and the ill-fated tour. This is in effect a study in the rhetorical construction of Johnson’s character, an effort therefore to fill in the other side of the equation through which we study the rhetorical presidency. Johnson’s career in this regard is illuminating, if only because his may be the first—or at least most notorious—example of an executive going over the heads of Congress to the people; but it is especially suggestive of the woeful consequences for the man for whom this strategy fails. To a great extent, I admit, those consequences were owing to the heated partisan dynamics at play during early Reconstruction; at the same time, I would like to suggest that sheer partisanship does not exhaust all possible lines of explanation. Even if that were the case, we can still ask after the ways in which such partisanship was articulated by prevailing assumptions about presidential character and how those assumptions in turn shaped contemporary and persistent impressions of the seventeenth president. By way of approach, I examine the process through which three such standards are held up and used to take the measure of the man. These are identified as the attributes of mind, character, and speech. In each case, a particular standard is assumed to mark presidential virtue and is in turn used as a basis for vilifying Johnson. Thus, where the good ruler is temperate, Johnson is an inebriate; where the good ruler is selfless, Johnson is selfregarding; where the good ruler is eloquent, Johnson is a rank demagogue. Needless to say, there lurks behind all these assumptions the still and silent image of the Great Emancipator, but that is another story. A few qualifications and we shall be on our way. Johnson of course claimed plenty of supporters, North and South, and he had a number of important newspapers banging his drum, among them the New York Times, Washington National Intelligencer, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the New York Evening Post. My analysis is limited to his critics, mostly northern, and their mouthpieces, and I have sought to supplement these papers by scouring the monthlies, published speeches, correspondence, and diaries. Still, I do not wish to generalize beyond these sources or to make claims to consensus or comprehensiveness. Taken together, however, I think these sources provide us with a fascinating glimpse into the tragi-comic drama of the long rise and quick fall of the tailor from Tennessee.

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stephen howard browne

“a

rambling and strange harangue”: johnson’s vice-presidential inaugural address Noon, March 11, 1865. Senate Chambers. Andrew Johnson was not feeling at all well. Soon he was to take office as the nation’s second highest steward, and now fever had set in. Relief of a kind came in the form of three shots of straight whiskey from the ready flask of the out-going Hannibal Hamlin, who thereby sent his successor on to a most inauspicious beginning. The Senate was hotter than expected, crowded, and by the time Johnson rose to speak he was by all accounts plastered. Matters were helped not at all by the commotion and noise set up by the ladies in the gallery. Few could hear the speaker, which was just as well, for what followed turned out to be “a rambling and strange harangue, which was listened to with pain and mortification by his friends.”2 As officially reported in the Congressional Globe and New York Times, the brief address suggests at first glance a passable performance. Structurally, at least, it follows a course for the most part familiar to the genre: Johnson ingratiates himself before his audience, office, and Constitution (“I therefore present myself here in obedience to the high behests of the American people to discharge a constitutional duty. . . .”); gestures to the sovereignty of the popular will (“The people, in short, are the source of all power.”); makes special mention of his own state of Tennessee, which he had courageously governed during its darkest hour (“She has bent the tyrant’s rod, she has broken the yoke of slavery, and to-day she stands redeemed.”); and concludes by reaffirming his fealty to the Constitution of the United States. Nothing exceptional or notorious here, and it must have been on this basis alone that a writer for the Philadelphia Press could praise the new vice president as rising “to the inspiration of the moment” and for announcing “to the American people the great truths of their sovereignty, and the responsibility to them of the Government.”3 Had that writer reflected on even this cleaned-up version of the text, however, certain other characteristics would have been made readily apparent. Because these features came to mark so many of Johnson’s ensuing efforts, it will be worth discussing them for a moment. Three such traits will serve the purpose of both describing the speech and the legacy it inaugurates. First, the extraordinary use of the pronominal and possessive first person. In a speech of approximately eight hundred words, such constructions run to twenty-eight “I”s and nine “my”s. Indeed, in the first paragraph alone “I” is deployed no less than twenty times. Now, a certain preoccupation with

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the self is no doubt to be expected under such circumstances, but as his audiences would learn soon enough, Johnson’s phrasing here foreshadows an almost pathological fixation on his personal identity. This trait is unmistakably related to a second prominent feature of the text: the speaker’s insistence that he is a legitimate claimant to the office he now occupies. Bearing in mind that, in the North, at least, no one seems to have questioned such a claim, this anxiety to assure himself and others must be read as a telling sign of Johnson’s personal and political insecurities. Time and again, on fourteen occasions at least, the speaker stresses the point: “Deem me not vain or arrogant,” “who claims no high descent,” “who comes from the ranks of the people,” “by the choice of a free constituency,” “however humble his origin,” “Humble as I am,” “plebeian as I am,” “a plebeian, elected by the people,” “I, though a plebeian boy,” and so forth. Again, this habit of self-characterization will serve in due time to stock the arsenal of his critics. It, too, is of a piece with a third trait of Johnson’s rhetorical practice: the compulsive need to invoke “the people” as the ultimate source of power and, by obvious implication, as the final check against party pressures. Thus he lectures his audience: “You, Senators, you who constitute the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States, are but the creatures of the American people; your exaltation is from them; the power of this Government consists in its nearness and approximation to the great mass of the people.” In nine such instances does Johnson recourse to “the people,” as if in waving this wand he might thus protect himself, give meaning, significance, and warrant to his own deeply insecure ambitions.4 But that is the official version of the text. Perhaps more telling, and more pertinent to the aims of this essay, is the manner in which the address was taken up and managed by others. Transcriptions of the speech vary, usually according to partisan dispositions, but we have on record an alternative version, something like the following that, too, has passed into the annals of American oratory: “I am a-goin’ for to tell you here to-day; yes, I’m a’goin’ for to tell you all, that I’m a plebeian! I glory in it; I am a plebeian! The people, yes the people of the United States have made me what I am; and I am a-goin’ for to tell you here to-day–yes, to-day, in this place–that the people are everything. Mr. Seward, Mr. Stanton, and you too, Mr. . . . [turning to Secretary Forney] what is the name of the Secretary of the Navy?” And so on. Finally turning away from the Senate, Johnson mumbled through his oath of office and, grabbing the Bible, declared, “I kiss the Book in the face of my nation of the United States.” Charged now with swearing in new senators,

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stephen howard browne

he faltered and ended the debacle by handing the book to the clerk and said, “Here, you swear them in. You know it better than I do.” Abraham Lincoln, sitting close by, was reported to have listened to the speech with “unutterable sorrow,” and later was said to have insisted: “Do not let Johnson speak outside!”5 Then as now, historians have been at some pains to explain away or otherwise account for what even a friendly biographer called “one of the most unfortunate drunks a mortal ever indulged in.” Lincoln himself, as we might expect, was forgiving. “Oh well,” he said to a skeptical Hugh McCulloch, secretary of the Treasury, “don’t you bother about Andy Johnson’s drinking. He made a bad slip the other day, but I have known Andy a great many years, and he ain’t no drunkard.” Johnson, recovering from his ordeal, read the papers and was so mortified that he ordered a transcription of what he actually said. Not that he apologized or explained his behavior, of course; that was not in him. But what Lincoln could not have predicted, what Johnson never considered, and what seems to have eluded the historians is that it did not much matter what the truth was about his drinking habits. The truth that mattered was that he had set himself up, made himself vulnerable to charges of drunkenness at virtually every crisis that beset his late political career.6 The northern press, not yet hardened into antipathy, proved all too willing to lend a quick hand in forging this lasting impression of an irresponsible inebriate at the highest orders of government. Readers in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, learned from the State and Union that “Johnson was so exhilarated with whiskey that he did not know which end his head was on,” while down east the New York News simply prayed: “God save the life of Abraham Lincoln.” Other readers were treated to this bit of doggerel: There is a place well known to all The Senators, both great and small A grog shop called the hole in the wall, At the Capitol of the nation. And there great Andrew Johnson got, And took a brandy toddy hot, Which made him drunk as any sot At the Inauguration.7

The extent and intensity of the criticism to which Johnson was subjected on this score may seem inexplicable to our otherwise hardened sensibilities. A moment’s reflection will suggest, however, that in the image of a drunk Andrew Johnson, contemporaries had caught sight of a truly mortifying spectacle. First, to say the obvious, there can be little confidence gained,

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even among supporters, of an intoxicated vice president. But more than that, Johnson’s performance could not help but to have set the man in sharp contrast to the sitting president, renowned for his temperance and self-control. It was Lincoln, after all, who declared before the Springfield Washingtonian Temperance Society that the champion of total abstinence was winning the battle: “The citadels of his great adversary are daily being stormed and dismantled; his temples and his altars, where the rites of his idolatrous worship have long been performed, are daily desecrated and deserted. The triumph of the conqueror’s fame is sounding from hill to hill, from sea and from land to land, calling millions to his standard at a blast.” In this Lincoln was adding his voice to a huge chorus of temperance workers throughout the midnineteenth century, when perceptions of the hard-drinking man’s man was dramatically giving way to new cultural dynamics that stressed cleanliness of body as well as of soul, where masculinity was marked no longer by the consumption of literally staggering amounts of alcohol but by restraint and sobriety. As Robert Abzug has taught us, per capita consumption of alcohol had fallen precipitously by mid-century, and this for several reasons. “Better drinking water became available in many locales,” Abzug observes, “the nature of industrial work and the logic of the marketplace encouraged values of industriousness and sobriety that changed the place of alcohol in daily life; and an emerging middle class began to make temperance an emblem of virtue.” Against these forces, Andrew Johnson never stood a chance.8 Not surprisingly, criticism of Johnson’s performance was widespread and vehement; still, it is worth noting that at this point nothing close to the partisan animosities that scarred the years ahead had yet developed. The attacks were not, however, indiscriminate: critics registered their complaints from several quarters and targeted the implications of the speech with respect to party, the office, the nation, and the international scene. The copperheads, still smarting from their recent and resounding defeat at the polls, jumped first. “The base conduct of Vice President Johnson on inauguration day,” declared one northern paper, “when he was so beastly drunk, that he did not know what he was about, has shamed the more respectable of his party, and they are calling loudly for his impeachment and the turning of such a wretch out of office. The Democratic press all over the country told the people repeatedly, before the Presidential election, just the character of this man Johnson.” In Virginia, the Richmond Sentinel crowed to northerners of “the low sot whom they have elected as their Vice-President,” and elsewhere papers pronounced “shame on the party that elected such a creature to such a position, and made our country the hissing and scorn of the civilized world.”

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The glee among Democrats and other anti-Republican critics was palpable: the very people who had most loudly championed the Tennessean were now loudest in calling for his removal. “‘But murder will out,’” they declared, “and so has Andrew Johnson’s true character come out at last, and so plain that those who were among the foremost to secure his election, are now denouncing him and calling for his impeachment and banishment from the position to which they have elected him.”9 In truth, of course, such calls were rare, and the Republican press remained as conspicuously silent on Johnson’s address as they were vocal about Lincoln’s sublime achievement that same day. But there was hay to be made, and administration opponents were quick to seize the opportunity. The speech, they contended, was not merely a personal and party disaster, but a black mark upon the country as a whole. Thus the Democratic Bangor Jeffersonian in Maine demanded that “Our National disgrace must be wiped out; our national honor must be vindicated. On the occasion of his installation to the office of Vice-President, Andrew Johnson was in a state of gross intoxication! His whole manner and speech were the inspiration of a brain crazed by intoxicating liquors. There was not a respectable man in that whole assemblage . . . from the President to the humblest page, who did not hang his head for shame at such conduct on such an occasion. Every decent man in the nation feels disgraced.”10 This much is not to suggest that the attacks were limited to the copperhead press. On the other end of the spectrum, “radical” spokespersons jumped on the occasion to lambast the hapless speaker. In a tactic worthy of the old trickster’s best, Thaddeus Stevens directed in the House that a passage from the New York World be read aloud, ostensibly to denounce such language but transparently to give it extra mileage. Hence the clerk read from a March 7 editorial: “The drunken and beastly Caligula, the most profligate of the Roman emperors, raised his horse to the dignity of consul. . . . The consulship was scarcely more disgraced by that scandalous transaction than is our Vice Presidency by the late election of Andrew Johnson. That office has been advanced in better days by the talents and accomplishments of Adams and Jefferson, Clinton and Gerry, Calhoun and Van Buren. And now to see it filled by this insolent, drunken brute, in comparison with whom even Caligula’s horse was respectable. . . . And to think that only one frail life stands between this insolent, clownish drunkard and the Presidency! May God bless and spare Abraham Lincoln.”11 Thus did Andrew Johnson make strange bedfellows indeed. Accusations of drunkenness were to dog the man throughout the rest of his career, and although we have no proof that he was

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ever again actually drunk in public, the image of a reeling and incoherent Johnson was to give to his opponents a ready weapon with which to bludgeon the nation’s nominal executive. More than one die had been cast that solemn day.

“how

sadly ludicrous was the president’s speech”: self-regard and the presidential ethos

Andrew Johnson was to suffer greatly in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln, not least when compared to a leader of known temperance and bodily rectitude. In this he was both cause and effect of his own actions, but an actor, too, in the unfolding drama of the late president’s apotheosis. The sober Lincoln and drunk Johnson; the one lean and hardened by frontier labor, the other a portly and fastidious tailor-cum-politician; one rumpled but dignified, the other an embarrassing dandy. There is of course more here than physical appearance and comportment, more than a contrast of superficial styles. Americans learned quickly to espy in the two men competing conceptions of what ought to qualify as becoming the character of a leader, what was truly American and what mere pretension. Above all, it seemed, the great leader was to so figure himself as to lose himself; that is, to find the source and effect of his identity not in pride of self but in the stuff and substance of America itself. Here was the singular greatness of Lincoln, “the unconsciousness of self,” as James Russell Lowell wrote, “which enabled him, though under the necessity of constantly using the capital I, to do it without any suggestion of egotism.” For Lowell and many others, this was art, this was leadership, of the very highest order. “Mr. Lincoln had never studied Quintilian,” Lowell explained, “but he had, in the earnest simplicity and unaffected Americanism of his own character, one art of oratory worth all the rest. He forgot himself so entirely in his object as to give his I the sympathetic and persuasive effect of We with the great body of his countrymen.”12 The contrast between the sixteenth and seventeenth presidents on this score was not preordained. Both rose from humble circumstances to political preeminence, both were ambitious, smart, tireless, courageous in their respective ways. Neither sought to distance himself from such pasts, in fact drew strength, purpose, and voice from the early worlds of rough-hewn cabins, frontier speech, and homespun garments. So what was the difference? The difference was that his past bequeathed to Lincoln an affective capacity for others, an enlarged mentality with which he could sympathize with the

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plight of others while respecting their essential dignity. So at least it seemed to The Nation and many other observers. Lincoln, “though awkward and ungainly in appearance, had a genuinely manly nature, a forgetfulness of self, and a tenderness of feeling which the country valued more than external manners, and which deserved universal respect.” Johnson on the other hand was “unable to rise above his early position.” True, he knew how to enter a room, was better at disposing of his hands and feet. But where, it was asked, “where in him shall we find the largeness of view, the patience with adversaries, the temperance of speech, the forgetfulness of self, that self-restraint which is the first and greatest quality of a gentleman, which so uniformly characterized Abraham Lincoln?”13 “Unable to rise above his earlier position”: here is the key to our understanding of Johnson’s reputation as an unforgivably self-regarding magistrate. It invites us to seek further into the psychology of class resentment than we perhaps ought to go, but at a minimum it gives us a clue to popular perceptions about the source of Johnson’s vaunted egotism. And nowhere was this character flaw more in evidence than when exhibited in his infamous “swing around the circle,” of late August and early September of 1866. That trip, undertaken to vindicate administrative policy by taking it to the people, must go down as arguably the single most ill-conceived moment in the mixed history of such populist gestures. Without rehearsing its details, we have a rich storehouse of public and published responses to the president’s oratorical efforts, and they are for the most part roundly negative. In general, it was thought a cynical and deeply undignified scramble for political legitimacy; in particular, it seemed an almost willful act of self-aggrandizement, the true nature of which was revealed most clearly, most startling, from the lips of the president himself.14 Something of the tone and effect of Johnson’s oratory during the “swing” may be suggested by his Cincinnati speech of September 12, 1866. As with virtually all such performances, this one is an admixture of improvisation, stock phrasing, and skirmishing with audiences of mixed sentiment. Combining defense and attack, Johnson labors to promote his resistance to the Freedman Bureau and his efforts to usher rebel states back into the Union as quickly as possible. In what became a familiar theme, as we shall see, Johnson layers into the speech not just standard policy arguments, but strenuous protestations of innocence, appeals to his personal past, and, most notoriously, allusions to his Christlike mission to save his country from the satanic designs of his opponents. Here was ultimate expression of the Manichaeism that came to dominate his rhetorical efforts, that unrelenting division between

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those on the side of the angels and those of the radical host. In the end, it was about those who sought to save the Union and those who were traitors; no middle ground was possible. How galling then to be accused of being a traitor himself: “It has been said that I turned traitor since I became president. Traitor to whom? I will call upon any man here and defy him to put his finger upon an instance in which I have swerved a hair’s breadth from the platform upon which the late lamented President and myself were elected. . . . What will I gain by treason? I am no candidate. I have filled all offices in the gift of the people, and my ambition is satisfied. . . . If more blood is needed, erect an altar, and upon it your humble speaker will pour out the last drop of his blood as a libation for his country’s salvation.”15 Among the most damning features of such performances was the attempt to vindicate himself through recourse to his past. Indeed, wrote the Atlantic Monthly, “The most offensive part which he plays in public is that of the “humble individual,” bragging of the lowliness of his origin, hinting of the great merits which could alone have lifted him to his present exalted station, and representing himself as so satiated with the sweets of unsought power as to be indifferent to its honors. . . . He would have everybody to understand that he is humble—is this a caricature? No. It is impossible to caricature Andrew Johnson when he mounts his high horse of humility and becomes a sort of cross between Uriah Heep and Josiah Bounderby of Cokestown.” It was thus Johnson’s singular talent to have figured out a way to pander to the people by pandering to his own past; unlike Lincoln, who rose above misfortune by freeing himself of the resentments such misfortune might impose, Johnson simmered in his stew, resentful on the one hand, prideful on the other, battling always those ghosts of privilege haunting and blocking his path to greatness. It was class resentment through and through. “He has always writhed under the sense of his plebeianism,” wrote The Nation, “and under the contempt with which he knew himself to be regarded by the Southern gentlemen whom he affected to despise, but whom he secretly envied.”16 The pathology that such resentment induces is scarcely unique in U.S. presidential history; we have seen it in our time in one aspect of Richard Nixon, with whom Johnson bears an eerie resemblance in so many respects. And like Nixon, the strain would manifest itself in certain tics of personality and language that gave to their critics irresistible evidence of a mind consumed by itself. The Atlantic Monthly thought Johnson “Egotistic to the point of mental disease,” The Nation that he was “devoured by an egotism of which he is painfully conscious, but which it is impossible for him to re-

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press.” After Johnson’s speech at the Douglas commemoration, the Chicago Tribune declared that the president “has neither dignity, nor a sense of the fitness of time and place, whose outrageous egotism will vent itself even in a funeral procession.” Reflecting on the spectacle that was the swing around the circle, The Independent could only conclude thus: “Consumed with an egotism which he cloaks in humility, he makes a peacock’s parade of his own character, his career, his sacrifices, his policy, and his love of the people. In the midst of the spectacle, thoughtful spectators give secret thanks to God that the basest citizen of the Republic, even though its chief magistrate, is unable to destroy, but only to disgrace it.”17 The physical symptoms of a man thus afflicted are not likely to be disguised well, and critics were ready to point them out: “that stone-cut head, that deep set and lascivious eye, that half clenched hand seeking to be a fist.” But even as Johnson’s intemperate body gave the lie to such internal disorder, the language with which that disease was expressed was unmistakable evidence of an ego so controlling that it had lost control of itself. To get at this trait more clearly, we might call to mind again the character of Lincoln’s address. In his brilliant rendering of Lincoln’s second inaugural address, Edwin Black observes that, “Insofar as he could, he withdrew from his public discourses any representation of his own personality. And in the place of his vanished ego, he proposed a set of principles of which he became the personification.” Earlier James Russell Lowell observed of Lincoln’s language: “Homely, dispassionate, showing all the rough-edged process of his thought as it went along, yet arriving at his conclusions with an honest kind of everyday logic, he was so eminently our representative man, that, when he spoke, it seemed as if the people were listening to their own thinking aloud.”18

“the

face of a demagogue, the heart of a traitor”: andrew johnson, orator

Andrew Johnson believed himself above all to be the herald of the people, the voice of all Americans dispossessed by special interests, class privilege, and the political elite. With no formal education and no birthright to the finer things in life, he had labored to make himself useful to the world by learning a trade. Johnson was, as he never tired of boasting, a tailor, a self-made man who rose to the nation’s highest office through hard work, courage, a sense of purpose, and an unflagging commitment to his country. These qualities he sought to express through an art self-taught as well. There, in the east

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Tennessee upcountry, Johnson had started the local debating society, practiced and honed his oratory before an audience of other social aspirants and, when necessary, before the mute pieces of cloth and half-finished suits of his tailor’s shop. In time the young man had become eloquent, after a fashion. He was, in the evocative language of Eric McKitrick, “a superb speaker. From the stump he would conjure up the spirit of Old Hickory; he would revive, in order that he might scourge, the ancient and terrible threats of tyranny and Federalism; he could call forth, as Mencken would later say of Bryan in that same country, all the ‘dread powers and principalities of the air.’ The simple mountaineers were deeply impressed by his philippics,” McKitrick writes, “and they would shiver in appreciation as his words rang through the valley in the gathering twilight.”19 Historians have been something at a loss to account for the oratorical legacy of Johnson. On the one hand, there can be no denying that he was, in earlier days at least, capable of captivating large audiences with his powerful voice and pointed arguments. Oratory was in fact Johnson’s second stock in trade; he made it work for him throughout a long and nearly unbroken career of political achievement. Even as president, Johnson’s supporters frequently remarked on his ability to identify with the people in simple but powerful language. After his speech in Philadelphia, the Washington National Intelligencer reported that his rhetoric “was of that direct, plain, and bold sort so characteristic of him. It reminds us,” the paper noted, “of the spirit he at one period exhibited in Tennessee, when, in view of the threats of violence, he uniformly proposed, before commencing the speech, to fight out before hand any issue of a hostile kind.” The historian Claude Bowers reflected that Johnson’s oratory “was that of the frontier, elemental, without finesse, graceless, void of humor, overcharged with intensity, but often overpowering in its sincerity, and persuasive in its downright honesty.” On the other hand, it was precisely this spirit, this all-too-ready willingness to duke it out with his political opponents that mortified northern sensibilities and invited widespread censure of his oratorical performances. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Dickson Bruce, and others have taught us to see in its oratory a variation on southern rituals of honor and violence descriptive of so much of that culture, and there is perhaps an explanation to be found here. Johnson was, in this respect, guilty merely of extending culturally specific speech behaviors into realms where such behaviors were alien, hence resented.20 There is merit in this view, I think, but Johnson’s rhetorical legacy requires something more in the way of explanation, something that will account more fully for the animus displayed by both speaker and spectator.

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For one thing, it is not necessarily the case that Johnson’s rustic ways were inherently off-putting. Lincoln is again an instructive case in point. As the New York Herald put it, “Both Lincoln and Johnson sprang from an origin not favorable to finished oratory. The one was a flat boatman from Kentucky and the other a tailor from North Carolina and Tennessee. To expect the polish of an Everett from such men would be absurd.” It was not the populist tone and southern ring to Johnson’s oratory that offended; it was rather his habit of address, his way of engaging audiences and disputing his character that prompted so much criticism. The contrast on this score was evident to even his supporters. Surely, lamented the New York Evening Post, “the President of the United States ought not to descend into the pit; and instead of calling names and indulging in personalities, he would have alone done well to imitate the noble patience with which Abraham Lincoln bore far bitterer gibes, far ruder attacks, from the same men.”21 No event better illustrates Johnson’s distance from Lincoln in the popular imagination than his speech from the White House balcony on Washington’s birthday, February 22, 1866. Thick in the middle of his veto struggles and fighting critics on several fronts at once, Johnson found himself in the relatively pleasant position of being serenaded by friends of the administration. As usual, the president had prepared no remarks, and confessed as much. This much, typical as well, did not deter him from launching into a full-scale defense of his position and attack on the radical vanguard. The result was pure Johnson: the profusion of self-references, the demands for respect, the appeals to “the people.” But there was more, to the delight of his audience and the horror of many. Warming to the occasion, the speaker invoked the sacrosanct images of Washington and Jackson and insisted that he, or at least his policies, deserved a rightful place in their company. Rehearsing his views and covering familiar ground, Johnson in turn defended his vetoes, proclaimed his loyalty to the Constitution, and his record of struggle to save the Union. All of this was familiar enough, but when the president turned on the offensive, a new kind of language entered into the ledger of American presidential rhetoric. Heated now on that cold evening by the applause of his audience and by his own exertions, Johnson complained that, having fought “traitors and treason in the South,” he now found himself fighting those who “still stand opposed to the restoration of these states.” A voice is reported to have called out for the names of such “traitors.” Johnson: “A gentleman calls for their names. Well, suppose I should give them. . . . I say Thaddeus Stevens, of Pennsylvania—I say Charles Sumner—I say Wendell Phillips and

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others of that stripe are among them.” Needless to say, for a sitting president to publicly identify and charge a duly elected representative and senator, as well as a prominent national reformer, with treason was too much for even moderate opinion to bear. But there was more: radical forces, for whom these men were but mouthpieces, were apparently designing, as he spoke, to end once and for all this defender of Constitution and Country: I make use of a very strong expression when I say that I have no doubt the intention was to incite assassination and so get out of the way the obstacle from place and power. Whether by assassination or not, there are individuals in this government, I doubt not, who want to destroy our institutions and change the character of the government. Are they not satisfied with the blood which has been shed? Does not the murder of Lincoln appease the vengeance and wrath of the opponents of this government? . . . If my blood is to be shed because I vindicate the Union and the preservation of this government in its original purity and character, let it be shed; let an altar to the Union be erected, and then, if it be necessary, take me and lay me upon it, and the blood that now warms and animates my existence shall be poured out as a fit libation to the Union of these States.22

Against this standard, where self-regard gives way to a consciousness so enlarged and so other oriented as to lose itself in the common sense, Johnson was held without mercy. And to his critics, he deserved every bit of the inevitable censure. In addition to the outlandishness of his claims, many noted, and were duly appalled at, the sheer frequency with which the speaker referred to himself. Indeed, wrote George Templeton Strong, “No orator has used the first personal pronoun in all its cases (I-me-my) so freely since the days of Erskine. It is an unhappy mistake and may paralyze all his efforts to do the same.” Others were less inclined to view this matter as a mistake; it was proof of a mind obsessed with itself. Johnson’s “‘I,’” one observer noted, “resembled the geometer’s description of infinity, having ‘its centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere.’ Among the many kind of egotism in which his eloquence is prolific, it may be difficult to fasten on the particular one which is most detestable or most laughable; but it seems to us that when his arrogance apes humility it is deserving perhaps of an intenser degree of scorn or derision than when it riots in bravado.” In fact, the numbers appear to suggest as much. Eric McKitrick notes that the personal pronouns in the speech, as published in the New York Herald, numbered 210 in a 6,000 word speech; that’s once every twenty seconds for every minute for an hour and ten minutes—a feat of which Nixon could only dream.23

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Treasonous radicals conspiring to assassinate, a president willing to martyr himself on the altar of the Union, the people surging up to protect and restore the dignity of high office—Andrew Johnson could scarcely have wished for more in this, the drama of his own sacrifice, however imagined it may have been. The character of Johnson’s speech, as with Lincoln’s, was thought to be a true reflection of the man himself. Indeed, there could be no real distinction drawn between the dancer and the dance, and in this Johnson was singularly unfortunate. His performance at the stump, balcony, and whistle-stop consistently exhibited a combination of qualities that doomed him in the eyes of his critics and not a few of his friends. Above all there seemed united in one personality two traits at war with each other but neither conducive to rhetorical success: on the one hand, he was obstinate, on the other, inconstant; willful to the point of abject stubbornness, but weak in the face of flattery; intransigent when he needed to compromise but unable to hold a promise; a man who once vowed that “Treason must be made infamous and traitors must be impoverished” but soon enough cast his lot with the rebel host. Johnson, it must be said, never seemed to acknowledge this battle, much less the damage it wrecked. But his listeners heard it, heard its rage and winced at the spectacle, until finally they could listen no more. In some leaders strength of conviction counts as a virtue; in some it cannot be distinguished from an intolerable righteousness. For his many critics, Johnson’s swing around the circle was a veritable orgy of self-indulgence, a humiliating spectacle of a president who lacked the most basic requirements for restraint and dignity of office. In the process, wrote the New York Tribune, the president “turned a solemn journey to the tomb of a celebrated American into the stumping tour of an irritated demagogue.” His speeches, frequently and loudly interrupted, became occasions for “descending into the pit,” exchanging threats and insults, yielding to no one and nothing except his own honor. There he had revealed, as one observer noted, “a degree of self-assurance and weak vanity, accompanied, as is frequently the case among ignorant and vulgar men, by a hopeless obstinacy, which rendered him the certain prey of any flatterer ready to sufficiently abase themselves before him.” If Johnson was thus recognizable as a type—the classic demagogue—it was still of a particular and unhappy type: in taking his case to the people, he had sought vindication; finding none, he sought then to bully them into supporting his cause. For this even his one-time friends could not forgive: “until this summer,” wrote Strong, “I held Andrew Johnson among the greatest and best of men. The carmagnoles of this recent stumping tour of his, the

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indecent demagogic blather he let off at every railroad station throughout the West, satisfied me that he was no statesman and that the people could not trust him as a leader.”24 By his own actions and behavior Johnson had at last fashioned himself into a living contradiction: he was an obstinate demagogue. This meant, among other things, that he literally would not, could not, locate himself properly in relation to the body politic. To possess this admixture of traits is to be forever at odds both with the people and with principle; it is to eliminate from one’s resources the possibility of decorum, hence rhetorical effectiveness. The Atlantic Monthly summed up Johnson’s plight accordingly: “Insincere as well as stubborn, cunning as well as unreasonable, vain as well as ill-tempered, greedy of popularity as well as arbitrary in disposition, veering in his mind as well as fixed in his will, he united in his character the seemingly opposite qualities of demagogue and autocrat, and converts the Presidential chair into a stump or a throne, according as the impulse seizes him to cajole or command.”25 For all the wrath Johnson called down on his head, it cannot be said that it was fixity of will alone that enraged his critics. Stubbornness in the right cause, after all, has a way of being called by different names, among them devotion, fealty, and steadfastness. Johnson was of course convinced that these were precisely the qualities that grounded and justified his own policy toward reconstructing the Union, as indeed he reminded his audience at every opportunity. Given the policy as it looked in the summer and fall of 1866, however, northern critics could only conclude that Johnson had betrayed his countrymen in the most audacious manner possible. Treason made infamous? Traitors impoverished? In truth it looked very much like the opposite: Johnson was bent, it appeared, on battling the loyal and conceding all to the rebellious states. The rage was palpable: Johnson had against his own professions melted into the arms of the South, seduced into betrayal by that very class he had spent a lifetime thundering against. It was all too much, but it was all as clear as day—Johnson the plebeian had arrived; he was now in charge, and how satisfying it must have been to spend the bounty of power on those who had earlier forsaken him. It was, wrote The Nation, “the sweetest triumph of his life when these men, as individuals, gathered around him crushed, humiliated, abject, waiting eagerly for his smile, echoing every sentiment that fell from his lips, pouring delicious flattery into his ear. . . . The temptation to mold his flattery so as to secure the continuance of this delightful adulation was irresistible. All obligations of fidelity, consistency, and honor melted away before the sweet vision of becoming a recognized Southern gentleman.”26

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Thus class resentment extinguishes itself—not by renouncing class as such but by becoming consanguineous with it. Thus the imagery of seduction and betrayal with which Johnson was depicted takes on a graphic, indeed physical dimension. The fixed will, the hard-headed devotion to principle—all this is revealed as the bluster of an essentially weak and unfaithful voluptuary. “Upon any view of the President’s case,” one magazine insisted, “it is evident that he has thrown himself into the arms of the South, and that his personal and political fortunes are identified with Southern success in the coming contest.” Commenting on the Washington’s Birthday speech, the Round Table charged in nearly identical language that “The President turns his back upon the men who made him, and throws himself into the arms of the South, where he came from. . . . We are sold out dirt cheap, and a thrill of conscious power will penetrate every corner of rebeldom.” It was left to fellow Tennessean Colonel Stokes, though not to him alone, to draw the inevitable comparison. If, instead of careening off to Douglas’s statue, Johnson had “stood at the tomb of Lincoln, and invoked the spirit of that great man, what response would he receive there? He would be told that he had betrayed the country, was false to his trust, and renegade to his party.”27

conclusion In November of 1866 an art critic for the Atlantic Monthly reflected on a recent work by the painter and line-engraver Alice Marshall. The piece in question was an engraving of the head of Abraham Lincoln. The excellence of the effort, she thought, was to be “measured by the inherent difficulties in the subject itself.” Squinting more closely, the writer thought she glimpsed this essence: Lincoln’s “character and physical expression of it were unique, and yet made up of the most complex elements;—simple, yet incomprehensible; strong, yet gentle; inflexible, yet conciliating; human, yet most rare; the strangest, and yet for all in all the most lovable, character in history.” Andrew Johnson, of whom literally none of this might be said, comes to us rather as all in all one of the most unlovable characters in U.S. presidential history. For this he had himself as well as his opponents to thank. Something like the wizard, he was not a bad man, just a very bad president, which is not at all the same thing as saying that we cannot learn from him and his legacy. At a minimum, his misfortunes are suggestive of what becomes of a rhetorical presidency when the executive is ill-suited in almost every possible way to the standards of performance requisite to its success. And again, the public

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construction of Johnson’s character—the attacks on his drinking, his selfregard, and obstinate demagoguery—help us see the extent to which such a presidency is as much effect as cause. But behind all this lay that great silent visage of the fallen president, and it is this fact, more than any other, which I think helps us understand the fate of Andrew Johnson. Lincoln was our only president whose shadow may be said to have possessed depth as well as reach. Bound within its recesses, Johnson could no more free himself than could his fellow citizens from the memory of the Great Emancipator, that human, yet most rare of characters.28

notes 1. Atlantic Monthly 18 (1866): 634; The Independent, September 6, 4; Grant quoted in Eric McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 425. 2. Papers of Andrew Johnson, ed. LeRoy P. Graf and Ralph W. Haskins (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1967) vol. 7, 507; H. Draper Hunt Jr., Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln’s First Vice-President (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1976), 196–97; Lincoln quoted in John Niven, Salmon P. Chase: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 379. 3. Quoted in Graf and Haskins, Papers, 507. 4. Andrew Johnson, “Remarks at Vice-Presidential Swearing In,” in Graf and Haskins, Papers, 502. 5. Johnson, quoted in H. Draper Hunt Jr., Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln’s First Vice-President (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1976), 196–97; Lincoln, quoted in John Niven, Salmon P. Chase: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 379. 6. Lincoln, quoted in Hunt, Hamlin, 198. 7. “New Hampshire Copperhead Abuse of Andrew Johnson” (Broadside), An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera, American Memory, Library of Congress. 8. Abraham Lincoln, “Address Before the Springfield Washingtonian Temperance Society,” in T. Harry Williams, ed., Selected Writings and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Hendrick’s House, 1980) 11; Robert Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 82. 9. “Copperhead Abuse” broadside. 10. Ibid. 11. New York World, March 7, 1865, 1. 12. “The President on the Stump,” North American Review 102 (1866): 531. 13. “Official Decorum,” The Nation 3 (1866): 191. 14. On the swing around the circle generally, see McKitrick, Andrew Johnson, 428–47. 15. New York Herald, September 13, 1866, 10. 16. Atlantic Monthly 18 (1866): 634; The Nation 3 (1866): 191. 17. Atlantic Monthly 18 (1866): 374; Independent, September 6, 1866, 4. 18. Independent; Edwin Black, “The Ultimate Voice of Lincoln,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 3 (2000): 50; Lowell, “Stump,” North American Review, 530.

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19. McKitrick, Andrew Johnson, 87. 20. Washington National Intelligencer, August 29, 1866, 2; Claude G. Bowers, The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929), 39. 21. New York Herald, September 11, 1866, 6; New York Evening Post, February 23, 1866, 2. 22. New York Herald, February 23, 1866, 1. 23. George Templeton Strong, Diary, ed. Allan Nevin and Milton Halsey Thomas (New York: Macmillan, 1952) 102; Atlantic Monthly 18 (1866): 634; McKitrick, Andrew Johnson, 293. 24. Quoted in Albert Castel, The Presidency of Andrew Johnson (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1979) 92; Round Table 4 (1866): 99; Strong, Diary, 107. 25. Atlantic Monthly 18 (1866): 374. 26. The Nation 3 (1866): 191. 27. Atlantic Monthly 18 (1866): 506; Round Table 3 (1866): 136; New York Herald, September 11, 1866, 6. 28. Atlantic Monthly 18 (1866): 643.



Resolute Commander for Just Peace: The Rhetoric of Ulysses S. Grant george r. goethals

“Let us have peace.” General U. S. Grant on accepting the Republican nomination for president, 1868 “. . . the great majority are now ready to condemn any interference on the part of the government. I heartily wish that peace and good order may be restored without issuing the proclamation. But if it is not, the proclamation must be issued; and if it is, I shall instruct the commander of the forces to have no child’s play.” President U. S. Grant on suppressing white violence toward blacks in Mississippi, 1875 Things change, including evaluations of presidencies. A 1956 Woman’s Day Chart of the Presidents of the United States, reflecting the received wisdom of the day, dismissed Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency with the phrases “As President: Administration scandals; Grant not personally involved.” Fifty years later, in 2006, a tpmcafe.com blog by Nathan Newman was entitled “Ulysses Grant: Our Greatest President?”1 What happened? Most polls of historians assessing the presidents of the United States rate Grant as a failure. He is ranked at or near the bottom, with Warren G. Harding and James Buchanan. Yet since the last comprehensive rating by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (1996),2 scholarship

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and commentary on Grant has exploded.3 As serious scholars take a closer look, the appraisal of Grant’s two terms takes on a decidedly more positive cast—despite the fact that superficial references still beat the scandal drum, as when Thomas Frank in an op-ed piece in The New York Times in 2006 off-handedly referred to “the Grant administration’s ceaseless ‘Saturnalia of plunder.’”4 My discussion of Grant’s rhetoric has a point of view, directly influenced by the recent biographies of Josiah Bunting, Frank Scaturro, and Jean Edward Smith, as well as reviews by James McPherson and Brooks Simpson.5 That view is that Grant’s presidency was marked by impressive and generally ignored successes in economic and foreign affairs, and noble but ultimately unsuccessful struggles to reform federal hiring practices and to protect the rights and status of slaves freed by the Civil War, and of the peoples Grant referred to as “the original inhabitants of this land.” Grant’s role in keeping the peace and holding the country together in the wake of the disputed election to succeed him in 1876 is perhaps the most enduring and least appreciated chapter in his presidency. In developing this point of view I shall argue that Grant’s rhetoric consistently presses for measures that will yield peace, order, justice, prosperity, and honesty and competence in government. Grant died in 1885 as the most revered man in the United States. As John Carpenter noted in 1970, “the response of a grief-stricken people and the outpouring of sentiments of respect from all around the globe attest to the tremendous grip he had on the affections of millions of people.”6 Grant is the only president to have served two full consecutive terms between Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson, and along with William McKinley is one of only two men between Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt to receive the majority of popular votes in two elections. Only Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan have accomplished the feat since. Appreciating Grant’s two administrations (1869–77) and his rhetoric requires at least some unraveling of the unique puzzles posed by his life and presidency. Not surprisingly one recent biography entitles its Introduction “The Problem of Grant.”7 Another entitles an early chapter “Grant the Man: The Intangible Factor.”8 Grant is often described as an enigma, and this term is applied both to his life as a whole and to his presidency specifically. In the light of the recent studies of Grant by Bunting, Korda, Scaturro, and Smith, and biographies by Edward Longacre and Simpson,9 it is fair to conclude that Grant’s life is indeed puzzling and enigmatic. However, I contend that his presidency is better understood as controversial.

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Grant’s presidential priorities, actions, strengths, and weaknesses seem in reasonable focus. He was concerned with creating a stable national prosperity through a sound currency, fair treatment of Native Americans, the rights of freedmen, international peace in the context of respect for the United States, and a strong civil service. There is much less agreement about appraising the success or failure of his overall performance. This lack of consensus is particularly clear with respect to perhaps the most important issues facing Grant’s presidency, reconstruction and the support of African Americans in the states participating in the recently defeated rebellion. Through the middle of the last century there was consensus that Grant had done too much for the freedmen and that his successor, Rutherford B. Hayes, was wise to leave such matters to the states. More recently, biographers such as John Carpenter and William McFeely argued that he did not do enough. McFeely notably, and controversially, charged that “by the summer of 1876 there was no one around the White House who gave a damn about the black people.”10 A newer consensus is emerging that Grant did all that could have or should have been done.11 Brooks Simpson specifically took issue with McFeely’s charge and argued that at least one man in the White House gave a damn, “the principal occupant of the building.”12 I begin this chapter by commenting briefly on some of the true enigmas of Grant’s life and personality before turning to a consideration of Grant’s presidential rhetoric. I then consider Grant’s standing in various presidential “greatness” ratings and its relation to assessments of Grant’s personality, particularly with respect to his level of intelligence and his ability to communicate. Those preliminaries addressed, I then consider Grant’s rhetoric.

brief life history One of the remarkable things about the man who would in less than eight years be elected president of the United States was that when guns at Fort Sumter fired the opening salvos of the Civil War, he was a total failure, at the age of 38. Born in 1822, Grant had grown up along the Ohio River. His father was well connected and politically and financially ambitious. His mother was emotionally reserved. Grant was small but physically skilled and daring, with an unusual ability to handle horses. He knew that he did not want to work in the family tanning business but was surprised when his father used his political connections to enroll him at the United States Military Academy at West Point. His initial reaction was to tell his father “I won’t go,”

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but his father persisted. In Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, he wrote “I really had no objection to going to West Point, except that I had a very exalted idea of the acquirements necessary to get through. I did not believe I possessed them, and could not bear the idea of failing.”13 Grant graduated from West Point at age twenty-one in 1843, near the middle of his class. After finishing at the Academy he stayed in the army and served with distinction in the Mexican War. In Mexico he took initiative and risk, impressing his peers, his superior officers, and the men serving under his command. After the war, in 1848, he married Julia Dent, the sister of one of his West Point roommates. Julia’s father had been opposed to the marriage, but not unalterably so. He worried that Grant would never amount to much. Ulysses and Julia had four children in the course of a long and very close relationship. During Grant’s years in the army after the Mexican War, he chafed during long separations from Julia and their growing family. He sought relief from boredom and loneliness in alcohol, and his drinking led him in 1854 to resign under pressure from the army. Back with his family, he attempted farming and several other business ventures in or near St. Louis. All failed. Finally, in May 1860, Grant very reluctantly moved Julia and the children to Galena, Illinois, where he worked as a clerk and laborer in the family leather business operated by his younger brothers. The work was unsatisfying, but the family was together and secure. War soon broke out, and Grant rejoined the army. In three years he rose to its highest rank. In four, he accepted Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. He remained head of the army in the Andrew Johnson administration and was elected president himself in 1868. Grant left office still the nation’s most popular citizen in 1877, and then spent two years traveling around the world with Julia. Returning to the United States in 1879, Grant contemplated running for a third term in 1880. That possibility did not ripen, and Grant went into business, and again failed completely. He was without means or prospects by 1884. That summer Grant felt a pain in his throat while eating a peach. The pain was the first visible sign of the throat cancer that would kill him in less than a year. In those months, during most of which he suffered excruciating pain and had difficulty swallowing and breathing, Grant wrote his two-volume, 275,000-word Personal Memoirs. The work saved his family financially. At the time it was praised as a masterful military memoir. Mark Twain, who aided its publication, described it as “the most remarkable work of its kind since the Commentaries of Julius Caesar”; decades later Gertrude

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Stein, writing about Grant in her 1947 volume Four in America, assessed the Memoirs as “one of the finest books ever written by an American.”14 What sort of man could be so cyclically successful and unsuccessful over the course of a lifetime?

the personality of ulysses s. grant Fascinating empirical studies by Dean Keith Simonton compare presidents of the United States on the basis of biographical synopses constructed from standard reference works.15 These reference works themselves are most likely based on the biographies and historical consensus available at the time the works were compiled. Blind ratings of the personal qualities of each president based on these synopses allowed all the presidents from George Washington through Ronald Reagan to be compared on psychological dimensions. The profile of Grant that emerges from these comparative ratings is notable in two respects. First, Grant is a total outlier. His standing on the various dimensions makes him, statistically, “the clear outcast in personality makeup.”16 Again we encounter Grant the enigma. Second, the picture of Grant that emerges is extremely negative. To put it crudely, he basically comes across as a dumb, lazy slob. He is the lowest by far on Achievement Drive, and also extremely low on Poise and Polish, Tidiness and Intellectual Brilliance. He is also the lowest on the style dimensions of Charismatic and Deliberative, and he is the second most Neurotic. In a more recent study of presidents’ intelligence by Simonton, including assessments of all U.S. presidents, from Washington to George W. Bush, Grant scores lowest on three of four IQ estimates.17 Was Grant really that lazy and that intellectually dim? Clearly that has been the historical consensus, until quite recently. However, certain facts pertaining to Grant’s intelligence are most contraindicative. At West Point he got by with very little effort, and still managed to do reasonably well, especially in mathematics. And in his first year at the Academy he “was already a writer of confident, limber English prose.”18 In a letter to a friend he wrote: “Again, if I look another way I can see Fort Putnam frowning far above: a stern monument to a sterner age, which seems placed there . . . to tell us of the glorious deeds of our fathers and bid us to remember their sufferings.”19 John Keegan in his 1987 The Mask of Command reminds us of Grant’s skill in reading and memorizing maps, and the importance of this skill in effective generalship.20 Keegan and others also emphasize the clarity of Grant’s

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orders, and the facility with which he wrote them. Grant’s Civil War aide Horace Porter described Grant composing orders for the Chattanooga campaign in 1863: “He soon after began to write dispatches, and I arose to go but resumed my seat as he said ‘sit still.’ My attention was soon attracted by the manner in which he went to work at his correspondence. At this time, as throughout his later (and earlier) career, he wrote nearly all his documents with his own hand, and seldom dictated to anyone even the most unimportant dispatch. His work was performed swiftly and uninterruptedly, but without any marked display of nervous energy. His thoughts flowed as freely from his mind as his ink from his pen; he was never at a loss for an expression and seldom interlined a word or made a material correction.” Porter noted that the dispatches “were both models of lucidity and of the highest importance.”21 John Keegan provides apt examples: To one subordinate at Vicksburg: “Move at early dawn toward Black River Bridge. I think you will encounter no enemy by the way. If you do, however, engage them at once, and you will be assisted by the troops further advanced. . . . [Later] If you are already on the Bolton Road continue so, but if you still have a choice of roads take the one leading to Edward’s Depot—Pass your troops to the front of your train, except a rear guard, and keep the ammunition wagons in front of all others.” To another: “Start one of your divisions on the road at once with its ammunition wagons—and direct it to move with all possible speed till it comes up with our rear beyond Bolton. It is important that great celerity should be shown in carrying out this movement, as I have evidence that the entire force of the enemy was at Edward’s Depot 7 o’clock yesterday evening and still advancing. The fight might be brought on at any moment—we should have every man on the field.”22 Similarly, fellow general George C. Meade’s chief of staff noted, “there is one striking feature of Grant’s orders; no matter how hurriedly he may write them on the field, no one ever has the slightest doubt as to their meaning, or even has to read them over a second time to understand them.”23 Consistent with these accounts, in his Memoirs Grant recounts his own writing on the Palm Sunday in 1865 when he met with Robert E. Lee at Appomattox to define the terms of surrender for the Army of Northern Virginia. Under the watchful eye of Lee and staff from both armies, Grant sat down to write: “When I put my pen to paper I did not know the first word I should make use of in writing the terms. I only knew what was in my mind and I wished to express it clearly so there could be no mistaking it.”24 In quickly writing out the surrender terms Grant was guided by Abraham Lincoln’s wish to

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“let ’em up easy.” Very importantly for a satisfactory ending to the rebellion, and for later disputes with the Johnson administration, Grant wrote in reference to all Confederate soldiers laying down their arms at Appomattox: “This done, each officer and man will be allowed to return to their homes, not to be disturbed by the United States authority as long as they observe their paroles and the laws in force where they reside.”25 At the end of his life, of course, Grant proved once again his ability to write quickly with simple and elegant clarity. The weight of the evidence is that Grant had very high levels of what Howard Gardner distinguished as linguistic, logical-mathematical, and spatial intelligences.26 Similarly, the energy with which Grant exercised command of the Union forces belies his extremely low rating on Simonton’s Achievement Drive factor. So does the quite extraordinary effort he put into composing memoirs under the most difficult conditions. But, Grant’s behavior during the times when he was unfocused and perhaps depressed, after he left the army in 1854, and after he returned from the trip around the world in 1879, reflects puzzling passivity. Biographer Bunting notes among Grant’s “qualities of character and temperament . . . habits of work (in which spasms of concentrated industry seemed to alternate with strange stretches of torpor).”27 In short, while the evidence pertaining to Grant’s intelligence clearly seems at odds with the view of him as one of the dimmest of presidents, the evidence pertaining to Achievement Drive partially supports the notion that his achievement strivings varied greatly. However, the present perspective is that Grant was fully engaged in an array of concerns during his presidency, and that he worked steadily and hard if not flamboyantly.

the presidential rhetoric of ulysses s. grant Just as the conventional wisdom about Grant’s intelligence and drive seems at least in part contradicted by the data, so does the conventional wisdom about his performance as president. As noted above, Grant has always been rated as a “failure” in various polls of historians. One of the reasons that Grant’s presidency is ranked so low is most probably the role of scandal in his administration. In the conventional wisdom, the most widely “known” aspect of Grant’s presidency is the alleged scandals. Research by Simonton has demonstrated that the single strongest statistical predictor of greatness ratings is whether an administration is known as having been marked by scandal.28 Recent treatments of the Grant administration question whether

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the scandals were blown out of proportion by contemporary commentators and historians unsympathetic to Grant.29 Nevertheless, this aspect of Grant’s presidency clearly influences the overall way that it is typically appraised. In considering Grant’s rhetoric we will discuss the alleged scandals and treat scandal’s opposite, reform. While most of Grant’s attention was on different concerns, it is important to remember that a great deal was said by others about scandal, and that what was said has greatly colored perceptions of Grant’s presidency. As with other presidents, Grant’s rhetoric throughout his years in office naturally reflected his principal concerns. Most of those concerns were articulated in his first inaugural address, on March 4, 1869. All of them were discussed in the annual messages Grant wrote to Congress during every December of his two administrations. In the first inaugural he addressed fiscal responsibility, good standing and peace with other nations, consolidating the results of the Civil War by securing rights for freed slaves, and protecting the lives and rights of Native Americans. In his subsequent annual messages he continued to address these four issues and also spoke to civil service reform. I will examine Grant’s rhetoric with respect to each of these concerns. However, before examining Grant’s treatment of these specific issues, it is well to remember his broader goals and their resonance with his personality and temperament. Those who have visited the General Grant National Memorial in New York, better known as Grant’s Tomb, will recall the phrase carved over the entrance: Let Us Have Peace. Grant the warrior knew better than most exactly what those words meant: the importance of mutual respect, fair treatment, and calm settlement of differences. He used the phrase for the first time at the end of his brief note of May 29, 1868 accepting the Republican Party nomination: “If elected to the office of President of the United States it will be my endeavor to administer all the laws, in good faith, with economy, and with the view of giving peace, quiet and protection everywhere. . . . Peace, and universal prosperity, its sequence, with economy of administration, will lighten the burden of taxation, while it constantly reduces the National debt. Let us have peace.”30 Grant clearly was concerned in his own life with “peace, quiet and protection.” The phrase “let us have peace” is a statement of both a personal wish and his overarching goal for the country, still in hostile turmoil more than three years after the end of the Civil War. Grant articulated further this overarching goal in the opening passages of his first inaugural: “The country having just emerged from a great rebellion, many questions will come before it for settlement in the next four years

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which preceding Administrations have never had to deal with. In meeting these it is desirable that they should be approached calmly, without prejudice, hate, or sectional pride, remembering that the greatest good to the greatest number is the object to be attained. This requires security of person, property, and free religious and political opinion in every part of our common country, without regard to local prejudice. All laws to secure these ends will receive my best efforts for their enforcement.”31 We shall see Grant’s emphasis on calm, security, freedom, lack of prejudice, and commonality, with the action—if necessary—to enforce them, repeated in much of his rhetoric. I turn first to his concern with fiscal soundness.

Specie Payment and National Honor Grant’s overall concern with peace and security is tied to his concern with fiscal affairs. It is notable that Grant preceded his famous “let us have peace” phrase by touching on prosperity, economy, taxation, and debt. He viewed peace as a necessary condition for prosperity. Peace was an end in itself but also the means for the nation to develop economically. The nation’s financial position when Grant took office was tenuous. The country had borrowed heavily to finance the Civil War and in the turmoil of the Johnson administration had not faced squarely the challenges of paying the debt and restoring fiscal order. There was a mild postwar depression from 1867–69. Grant’s views were closely aligned to the business and financial interests of the Republican Party. He was concerned about lowering interest rates, inflation, expenditures, taxes, debt, and the trade deficit. One key mechanism in addressing these problems was to return the nation to specie payment of debt backed by gold. In Grant’s view this would halt inflation, stabilize the nation’s currency, and ultimately restore international respect and therefore national honor. At the same time, Grant understood that any economic policy produced winners and losers, and that debtors fared better with greenbacks not backed with coin. Inflated currency worked in their favor, and many of Grant’s political supporters, especially farmers and westerners, preferred a looser fiscal policy. Grant made the case for specie payment in his first inaugural. Immediately after appealing for freedom and calm, Grant addressed the problem of debt: A great debt has been contracted in securing to us and our posterity the Union. The payment of this, principal and interest, as well as the return to a specie basis

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george r. goethals as soon as it can be accomplished without material detriment to the debtor class or to the country at large, must be provided for. To protect the national honor, every dollar of Government indebtedness should be paid in gold. . . . All divisions—geographical, political, and religious—can join in this common sentiment. How the public debt is to be paid or specie payments resumed is not so important as that a plan should be adopted and acquiesced in. A united determination to do is worth more than divided counsels upon the method of doing.32

Grant consistently pressed this point. For example, in his first annual message to Congress, on December 6, 1869, Grant wrote that among the evils growing out of the rebellion. . . . is that of irredeemable currency. It is an evil which I hope will receive your most earnest attention. It is a duty, and one of the highest duties, of Government to secure to the citizen a medium of exchange of fixed, unvarying value. This implies a return to the specie basis, and no substitute for it can be devised. It should be commenced now and reached at the earliest practicable moment consistent with fair regard to the interests of the debtor class. . . . Fluctuation . . . in the paper value of the measure of all values (gold) is detrimental to the interests of trade. It makes the man of business an involuntary gambler, for in all sales where future payment is to be made both parties speculate as to what will be the value of the currency to be paid and received. I earnestly recommend to you, then, such legislation as will insure a gradual return to specie payments.33

Grant repeated such urging annually. This was not an issue on which the Congress could come to agreement. Four years later, in his fifth annual message of December 1, 1873, Grant placed the specie payment issue in the context of the panic of 1873. Grant noted, “The revenues have materially fallen off for the first five months of the present fiscal year from what they were expected to produce, owing to the general panic now prevailing . . . it is your duty . . . to provide wise and well-considered legislation against its recurrence. My own judgment is that . . . we can never have a permanent prosperity until a specie basis is reached.”34 Soon after delivering this message, Grant faced one of the most demanding tests of his presidential leadership. During the Civil War the United States Treasury had issued $400 million in “greenbacks,” currency not redeemable in coin. Some of these funds were useable, and in the fall of 1873 Grant’s Treasury Secretary William Richardson had reissued $26 million for immediate needs. This step was mildly inflationary, and it only created more pressure from soft-money members of Congress to issue more greenbacks. That pressure resulted in the passage in April of 1874 of the so-called Infla-

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tion Bill, authorizing even more greenbacks. Grant had to decide whether to sign it. To do so would put more money in circulation and perhaps help revive the economy. On the other hand, it was uncertain what effect the bill would have, and whether it would make eventual return to specie payment even more difficult if not impossible. Most of Grant’s cabinet favored his signing the bill. And at that point in the nation’s history, vetoes were rare, except for bills that the president deemed unconstitutional. Despite intense pressure from both sides, but more from those favoring the bill, Grant took his time. He told one cabinet member that “he was in no hurry to sign the measure.”35 During the next several days Grant wrestled with the issues the bill presented and listened carefully to the arguments of his cabinet. He maintained silence but heard them out. When he finally met with his cabinet to announce his decision, they were stunned that Grant had decided to veto the bill. He said that he had given the matter a great deal of thought and had initially leaned toward approving it. He actually composed a message to Congress explaining his reasons for doing so. It said that he felt obligated to explain his position “because no opponent of the measure has been more unreserved in expressing views against the expansion of the currency than I have, or advocated more earnestly than me the duty and obligation of Congress to legislate in such manner as to best carry out their repeated pledges to return to a specie basis at the earliest practicable day.”36 Grant tried to sustain the argument that the bill was a good compromise between “industry” and “Capital” and that continued uncertainty about the issue would mean that “Capital is withheld from legitimate purposes of trade and commerce” such that both “would remain paralyzed.”37 “The present measure may be looked upon as a compromise between the advocates of two financial extremes,” Grant had written, “and as a final settlement of the question.”38 But Grant found his own arguments unpersuasive. He then wrote out a veto message which he read at the cabinet meeting: “I must express my regret at not being able to give my assent to a measure which has received the sanction of a majority of the legislators, chosen by the people to make laws for their guidance, and I have studiously sought to find sufficient arguments to justify such assent, but unsuccessfully.” Grant argued that if the bill did not have its desired effect there would be pressure toward the printing of more unredeemable money. “It is a fair inference, therefore, that if in practice the measure should fail to create the abundance of circulation expected of it the friends of the measure, particularly those out of Congress, would clamor for such inflation as would give the expected relief.”39 This approach, Grant argued, “in my belief, is a departure from the true principles of finance,

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national interest, national obligations to creditors, Congressional promises, party pledges (on the part of both political parties), and of personal views and promises made by me in every annual message sent to Congress and in each inaugural address.”40 All but two members of the cabinet argued at length that the measure was not inflationary and that Grant should reconsider. But as Smith notes: “The president was unimpressed. No chief executive was better than Grant at listening to a case he disagreed with and making no comment whatever. It was a habit he acquired on the battlefield. Subordinates should speak their mind, but the general in chief would make his own decision.”41 When argument based on the merits did not work, the majority argued that Grant would pay a steep political price for taking such an unusual step. Grant replied, “I dare say the first result will be a storm of denunciation. But I am confident that the final judgment of the country will approve my veto.”42 The immediate reaction was, in fact, quite favorable. Grant was praised in many quarters, and his allies in Congress were easily able to beat back an attempt at override. James Garfield, who became president himself in 1881, wrote: “For twenty years no president has had an opportunity to do the country so much service in a veto message as Grant has, and he has met the issue manfully.”43 Others compared Grant’s veto and victory to Vicksburg and Appomattox. “The proverbial obstinacy of General Grant has never found a better field of display,” declared The New Haven Palladium congratulating the president on his entire approach to the inflation issue.44 The immediate and long-term effects were enormous. Because of the support Grant received from the population as a whole and the press, Congress, under the skillful leadership of Senator John Sherman (brother of Grant’s close friend and fellow General, William Tecumseh Sherman), passed a bill (the Resumption Act) in December of 1874 providing for the return to specie payment in 1879. Thus one of Grant’s highest priorities, treated at length in his first inaugural, was finally accomplished. Grant was so overjoyed he approved the measure with a special message to Congress, on January 14, 1875. He wrote: “I have ventured upon this subject with great diffidence, because it is so unusual to approve a measure—as I most heartily do this—. . . and to announce the fact by message. But I do so because I feel that [it] is a subject of such vital importance to the whole country that it should receive the attention of and be discussed by Congress and the people through the press, and in every way, to the end that the best and most satisfactory course may be reached of executing what I deem most beneficial legislation on a most vital question to the interests and prosperity of the nation.”45

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The impact of resumption was immediate, and it produced lasting economic and political effect. First, it paved the way for a growing U.S. economy for the rest of the nineteenth century. Second, its sound money approach “established the standard to which the country remained committed until the New Deal period.”46 Finally, Jean Edward Smith argues that “the Resumption Act was not only a pivotal event in restoring the American economy, it also marked a fundamental redefinition of the nation’s political parties. Grant imparted to the Grand Old Party a commercial, pro-capitalist stance that replaced emancipation as the party’s raison d’etre.”47

Civil Rights for African Americans and Reconstruction Once Grant’s attitudes toward African American slaves freed by the war crystallized, they never wavered. It is surprising that any historian would doubt Grant’s commitment to equal treatment. As with George Washington, Grant’s views on blacks and slavery were profoundly influenced by his command of U.S. armies. In Washington’s case, when he took command of the Continental Army in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in July 1775, it was unthinkable to him that blacks could be soldiers. However, the exigencies of war and the need for manpower led him to change his mind. By the end of the war, both free blacks and escaped slaves fought for Washington. While the film of reenactors shown at the United States Park Service Visitor Center at Yorktown, Virginia, shows only white men, the Rhode Island regiment, commanded by Colonel Alexander Hamilton, that participated in the critical nighttime attack on Redoubt 10 in that 1781 battle, was largely composed of black soldiers. Washington understood the contributions he needed them to make. The Continental Army during the American Revolution was the last integrated U.S. fighting force until Korea. It was nearly one-quarter black by the end of that war. For Grant, escaped slaves in the Civil War were initially no more than an extra burden. Initially this “property” was returned to owners. Then Union leaders realized the support that escapees gave to Confederate armies and stopped returning them. Eventually, they fought, and fought well, for the Union. Grant was very much aware of their contributions and by the end of the war had completely adopted for himself Abraham Lincoln’s determination to emancipate and enfranchise all slaves through constitutional amendment. As head of the army after Lincoln’s assassination, serving under President Andrew Johnson, Grant quickly became alarmed at Johnson’s plans to restore political power in the South to

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those who had led the rebellion, and thus lose the gains made for African Americans by the Civil War. It was clear that southern leaders would suppress blacks as far as they could. Grant, along with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, resisted Johnson as much as possible without being outright insubordinate. In January 1866, roughly nine months after the end of the war, Grant issued General Orders, No. 3 authorizing occupying troops in the southern states to avail themselves of federal courts when state courts were not protecting the rights of blacks, among others: “Military Division and Department Commanders, whose commands embrace, or are composed of, any of the late rebellious States, and who have not already done so, will at once issue and enforce orders protecting . . . colored persons from prosecutions in any of said States charged with offenses for which white persons are not prosecuted or punished in the same manner and degree.”48 When Johnson tried to nullify the effects of this order in April, Grant worked secretly with Stanton to keep it in force, and in July he issued General Orders, No. 44 in an effort to continue to protect blacks, and consolidate the accomplishments of the recent war: “Department, District and Post Commanders in the States lately in rebellion are hereby directed to arrest all persons who have been . . . charged with the commission of crimes . . . against officers, agents, citizens, and inhabitants of the United States, irrespective of color, in cases where the civil authorities have failed, neglected, or are unable to arrest . . . such parties.”49 Grant’s commitment to protecting African Americans from renewed suppression was enduring. He specifically addressed the problem of voting rights in his first inaugural address: “The question of suffrage is one which is likely to agitate the public so long as a portion of the citizens of the nation are excluded from its privileges in any State. It seems desirable that this question should be settled now, and I entertain the hope and express the desire that it may be by the ratification of the fifteenth article of amendment to the Constitution.”50 Grant pushed hard for this amendment, guaranteeing blacks the right to vote. He went so far after six months in office as to ask David Butler, the governor of Nebraska, to convene a special session of the state legislature to take up the question: In view of the fact that the next session of the legislature of Nebraska does not occur until the year 1871, and that it will therefore not have an opportunity of taking action upon the ratification of the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution until that time, I would respectfully suggest that you consider the propriety of convening the legislature in extra session for this purpose, and if the proposition should meet with your views, I request that a proclamation be issued to

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that effect at as early a period as you may deem expedient. I am induced to write you upon this subject from the earnest desire I have to see a question of such great national importance brought to an early settlement, in order that it may no longer remain an open issue, and a subject of agitation before the people.51

When the amendment was finally ratified by the states six months later, Grant strongly expressed his satisfaction in a special message to Congress. In that message he also expressed the importance of providing for equal educational opportunities for blacks so that they could use their new franchise well and have it be “a blessing and not a danger.” Grant spoke of the “vast importance of the fifteenth amendment. . . . A measure which makes at once 4,000,000 people voters who were heretofore declared by the highest tribunal in the land not citizens of the United States, nor eligible to become so . . . is indeed a measure of grander importance than any other one act of the kind from the foundation of our free government to the present day.” In addressing the challenge of education he quoted George Washington’s Farewell Address urging the promotion of “institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge” and urged Congress “to take all the means within their constitutional powers to promote and encourage popular education throughout the country, and upon the people everywhere.”52 Grant’s rhetoric about the issue of black citizenship was absolutely consistent throughout his years in office. He wanted African Americans to have the same opportunities to build good lives for themselves as any other citizen. In his second inaugural address he said, “The effects of the late civil strife have been to free the slave and make him a citizen. Yet he is not possessed of the civil rights which citizenship should carry with it. This is wrong, and should be corrected. To this correction I stand committed, as far as Executive influence can avail. Social equality is not a subject to be legislated upon, nor shall I ask that anything be done to advance the social status of the colored man, except to give him a fair chance to develop what is good in him, give him access to the schools, and when he travels let him feel assured that his conduct will regulate the treatment and the fare he will receive.”53 Not only did Grant consistently urge civil rights and equal treatment for African Americans in the United States, he also strongly and consistently denounced continuing slavery in Cuba. In his fourth annual message of 1872, Grant discussed the long-simmering insurrection there. He argued: “I can not doubt that the continued maintenance of slavery in Cuba is among the strongest inducements to the continuance of this strife. A terrible wrong is the natural cause of a terrible evil. The abolition of slavery and the introduction

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of other reforms in the administration of government in Cuba could not fail to advance the restoration of peace and order.”54 There is less debate about Grant’s rhetoric than there is about his actions to back it up. The controversy about whether Grant actually did enough to stop white depredations of blacks—or too much—continues. Clearly Grant took strong action throughout his administration to stop persecution of African Americans in the South, and, as best he could, to ensure fair elections. The means at his disposal, sending in federal troops and declaring martial law, to restore order and monitor elections, were not well suited to the task. Furthermore, political support for such interventions declined in the nation and in the Republican Party throughout Grant’s eight years in office. People were tired of conflict, and southerners became more skillful at covert intimidation. The result, of course, was increasing subjugation of blacks under Jim Crow laws until the mid-twentieth century. Yet the record of strong and consistent intervention during Grant’s years as president is clear. In the spring of 1871 the actions of the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina were of special concern. Grant wrote informally to James G. Blaine, Speaker of the House of Representatives, urging legislative action to give Grant the authority to protect black citizens: “There is a deplorable state of affairs existing in some portions of the South demanding the immediate attention of Congress. If the attention of Congress can be confined to the single subject of providing means for the protection of life and property to those Sections of the Country where the present civil authority fails to secure that end, I feel that we should have such legislation.”55 Two weeks later Grant renewed the pressure with a formal request to the House and Senate requesting the necessary action: “A condition of affairs now exists in some of the States of the Union rendering life and property insecure, and the carrying of the mails, and the collection of revenues dangerous. The proof that such a condition of affairs exists in some localities is now before the Senate. That the power of the Executive of the United States, acting within the limits of existing laws, is sufficient for present emergencies is not clear. Therefore, I urgently recommend such legislation, as in the judgment of Congress, shall effectively secure the life, liberty, and property, and the enforcement of law, in all parts of the United States.”56 Responding to Grant, the so-called Ku Klux Klan Act was passed, and Grant used and perhaps exceeded the authority it gave him to crush the Klan. He issued the following proclamation six weeks later: This law of Congress applies to all parts of the United States and will be enforced everywhere to the extent of the powers vested in the Executive. But inasmuch

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as the necessity therefor is well known to have been caused chiefly by persistent violations of the rights of citizens of the United States by combinations of lawless and disaffected persons in certain localities lately the theatre of insurrection and military conflict, I do particularly exhort the people of those parts to suppress all such combinations by their own voluntary efforts. . . . I do, nevertheless deem it my duty to make known that I will not hesitate to exhaust the powers thus vested in the Executive whenever and wherever it shall become necessary to do so for the purpose of securing to all citizens . . . the peaceful enjoyment of rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution.57

Grant’s resolve to protect the lives and the rights of the freedman remained steady in the subsequent years of his administration. He wrote a special report to Congress in January 1875, seeking legislative action to clarify his duties in these matters, and at the same time strongly supporting the actions of General Philip Sheridan in restoring Republican control to the legislature in Louisiana after brutal attacks on blacks and white sympathizers. Speaking into the political wind, he framed a passionate message in terms of his duty to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment and the crying need to redress a recent massacre of blacks in the town of Colfax: Fierce denunciations ring through the country about office holding in Louisiana, while every one of the Colfax miscreants goes unwhipped of justice, and no way can be found in this boasted land of civilization and Christianity to punish the perpetrators of this bloody and monstrous crime. Not unlike this was the massacre in August last . . . Several Northern young men of capital and enterprise had started the little and flourishing town of Coushatta. Some of them were Republicans. . . . They were therefore doomed to death. Six of them were seized and carried away from their homes and murdered in cold blood. No one has been punished, and the conservative press of the State denounced all efforts to that end and boldly justified the crime. To say that the murder of a negro or a white Republican is not considered a crime in Louisiana would probably be unjust to a great part of the people, but it is true that a great number of such murders have been committed, and no one has been punished therefor, and manifestly, as to them, the spirit of hatred and violence is stronger than law.58

Subsequently Grant would continue seeking congressional authorization to enforce the laws and suppress violence, but he would exercise his own judgment as to when Executive action was required. Thus in October 1876, in the last months of his presidency, with much less legislative backing than he had in 1871, he once again issued a proclamation before he took the necessary steps to enforce the laws and protect black citizens, this time in South Carolina: “Whereas it is required that, whenever it may be necessary, in the judgment of the President, to use the military force for the purpose

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aforesaid, he shall forthwith, by proclamation, command such insurgents to disperse and retire peaceably to their respective homes within a limited time. Now, therefore, I, Ulysses S. Grant, President of the United States, do hereby make proclamation, and command all persons engaged in said unlawful insurrectionary proceedings to disperse and retire peaceably to their respective abodes within three days of this date, and hereafter abandon said combinations and submit themselves to the laws and constituted authorities of said state.”59 Grant then sent troops to protect black citizens and keep the peace.

Peace and International Respect Most historians who get past dismissing Grant’s presidency as no more than a school for scandal do credit him with appointing a wise and talented secretary of state in Hamilton Fish, and for letting Fish settle some difficult problems. But more credit should be given to Grant. His experience and temperament made him strongly resist sliding into war with foreign powers and energetically seek peaceful solutions. Bunting recently noted that like other soldier-presidents, Grant was a “closet moderate” on foreign affairs.60 He further notes that Grant resisted the temptations and pressures to launch a war with Great Britain, in retaliation for its generally covert help to the South during the Civil War, just as General/President Dwight Eisenhower resisted pressures to introduce U.S. ground troops into Indochina in 1954.61 Grant briefly addressed international affairs in his first inaugural: “In regard to foreign policy, I would deal with nations as equitable law requires individuals to deal with each other, and I would protect the law-abiding citizen, whether of native or foreign birth, wherever his rights are jeopardized or the flag of our country floats. I would respect the rights of all nations, demanding equal respect for our own. If others depart from this rule in their dealings with us, we may be compelled to follow their precedent.”62 In the second month of Grant’s first term the Senate overwhelmingly (54 to 1) rejected a treaty that had been negotiated in the Johnson administration settling the so-called Alabama affair, in reference to a Confederate commerce raider built in England during the war. Charles Sumner, head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, argued that British help to the rebellion had prolonged the war two years. There was great pressure on Grant from many in Congress to go so far as to initiate military action against the British. Grant instinctively understood that it was not in the nation’s interests to enter a war with Great Britain at that time, if ever.

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Negotiations resumed with Great Britain in Washington in 1870 but were not making much progress when Grant sent his annual message to Congress in December. In it he prodded the British gently but firmly: I regret to say that no conclusion has been reached for the adjustment of the claims against Great Britain growing out of the course adopted by that Government during the rebellion. The cabinet of London, so far as its views have been expressed, does not appear to be willing to concede that Her Majesty’s Government was guilty of any negligence, or did or permitted any act during the war by which the United States has just cause of complaint. Our firm and unalterable convictions are directly the reverse. I therefore recommend to Congress to authorize the appointment of a commission to take proof of the amount and the ownership of these several claims, on notice to the representative of Her Majesty at Washington, and that authority be given for the settlement of these claims by the United States, so that the Government shall have the ownership of the private claims, as well as the responsible control of all the demands against Great Britain. It can not be necessary to add that whenever Her Majesty’s Government shall entertain a desire for a full and friendly adjustment of these claims the United States will enter upon their consideration with an earnest desire for a conclusion consistent with the honor and dignity of both nations.63

The British could read between the diplomatic lines and negotiations resumed the next month (January 1871). A treaty was signed in early May and overwhelmingly ratified by the Senate two weeks later. It settled the major issues favorably to the United States and provided for international arbitration of the remaining ones. Grant proudly issued a proclamation announcing the treaty and then addressed the matter with satisfaction in his annual message in December 1871: “The year has been an eventful one in witnessing two great nations, speaking one language, and having one lineage, settling by peaceful arbitration disputes of long-standing and liable at any time to bring those nations into bloody and costly conflict. An example has thus been set which, if successful in its final issue, may be followed by other civilized nations, and finally be the means of returning to productive industry millions of men now maintained to settle the disputes of nations by bayonet and broadside.”64 The final arbitrations in Geneva, Switzerland, were successful, and Grant pointed the way for the world to adopt a new method of settling disputes. In an interview in Geneva during his trip around the world after his presidency, Grant said that that city was “where the principle of international arbitration was established, which I hope will be resorted to by other nations and be the means of continuing peace to all mankind.”65 Later Grant developed the idea

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further, showing he was ahead of his time in thinking about international relations just as he was about civil rights: “nothing would afford me greater happiness than to know, as I believe will be the case, that, at some future day, the nations of the earth will agree upon some sort of congress, which will take cognizance of international questions of difficulty, and whose decisions will be as binding as the decision of our Supreme Court is binding on us. It is a dream of mine that some such solution will be found for all questions of difficulty that may arise between different nations.”66 The settlement of the Alabama claims was carried out in a context where war with Spain was also looming. Rebels in Cuba were fighting the Spanish government, seeking independence. Grant repeatedly noted in his annual messages that continued slavery on that island was a major cause of the belligerency. There was significant pressure within Grant’s administration and within the Congress to recognize the rebel government and engage in war with Spain. Grant wrote a lengthy message to Congress about long-standing principles of U.S. neutrality and the conditions which might justify war. He noted that the “liberal and peaceful principles adopted by the Father of His Country and the eminent statesman of his day, and followed by succeeding Chief Magistrates and the men of their day, may furnish a safe guide to those of us now charged with the direction and control of public safety.”67 He then argued in detail as to why conditions did not warrant intervention. He also noted that he would continue to try to help Spain resolve the dispute: “I have, since the beginning of the present session of Congress, communicated to the House of Representatives, upon their request, an account of the steps which I had taken in the hope of bringing this sad conflict to an end and of securing to the people of Cuba the blessings and the right of independent self-government. The efforts thus made failed, but not without an assurance from Spain that the good offices of this Government might still avail for the objects to which they had been addressed.”68 Grant concluded that he would keep the pressure on Spain and that U.S. intervention was not ruled out: “The questions concern our own dignity and responsibility, and they have been made, as I have said, the subjects of repeated communications with Spain. . . . It is hoped that these will not be disregarded, but should they be these questions will be made the subject of a further communication to Congress.”69 The result of Grant’s intervention with the Congress was that a resolution recognizing the rebel belligerency was defeated in the House of Representatives, 100 to 70. War with Spain as well as Great Britain was avoided. Clearly Hamilton Fish influenced Grant in these affairs, but Grant’s own

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instincts were against entanglement and war. Fish handled the details. His doing so fit exactly with Grant’s view from his military days as to how subordinates were to help shape but ultimately execute policy. Thus Grant and his excellent secretary of state made good on Grant’s inaugural pledge “to respect the rights of all nations, demanding equal respect of our own.”

The Original Occupants of the Land Surprisingly at the time, Grant indicated his deep concern with fair treatment of Native Americans in his first inaugural. He stated: “The proper treatment of the original occupants of this land—the Indians—is one deserving of careful study. I will favor any course toward them which tends to civilization and ultimate citizenship.”70 Underlying Grant’s concern was the fear of Native Americans’ ultimate extinction. He devised what he called a “peace policy” toward Indians. The goal was to remove Indians to reservations where they would be able to take up agriculture, convert to Christianity, and become full citizens. While this policy now may seem paternalistic at best and cruel at worst, Grant quite rightly saw the alternative as genocide. Jean Edward Smith writes that Grant and the church groups, mostly Quakers, that he worked with to formulate Indian policy, unfortunately “saw nothing worth preserving in Indian culture, and as a consequence failed to build upon the social structure that existed in tribal communities. . . . Yet for the 1870s Grant’s policy was remarkably progressive and humanitarian.”71 Grant’s concern with Native Americans likely grew out of the respect he developed for members of the tribes he had contact with during his army days in the Pacific Northwest. It was strongly reinforced by his close relationship with former military aide and then commissioner of Indian Affairs, Ely Parker. Parker was a full-blooded Seneca who had been a chief and a grand sachem of the Iroquois Confederacy. He was an accomplished engineer, lawyer, and soldier.72 Parker was Grant’s principal aide when he met Lee at Appomattox.73 Grant’s rhetoric on this issue, as with other priorities, is consistent and at times passionate. He bowed to certain realities of development, but strove to find a way to protect the Indians. In his first annual message to Congress, he noted that “The building of railroads . . . is rapidly bringing civilized settlements into contact with all the tribes of Indians. No matter what ought to be the relations between such settlements and the aborigines, the fact is they do not harmonize well, and one or the other has to give way in the end. A system which looks to the extinction of a race is too horrible for a

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nation to adopt without entailing upon itself the wrath of all Christendom and engendering in the citizen a disregard for human life and the rights of others. . . . I see no substitute for such a system except in placing all the Indians on large reservations, as rapidly as it can be done, and giving them absolute protection there.”74 In his third annual message he again took up the theme of reservations. “I recommend to your favorable consideration also the policy of granting a Territorial government to the Indians. . . . In doing so every right guaranteed to the Indians by treaty should be secured.”75 He again took up the issue with more focus and passion in his second inaugural when he proclaimed the goal by a humane course, to bring the aborigines of the country under the benign influences of education and civilization. It is either this or war of extinction. Wars of extinction . . . are demoralizing and wicked. Our superiority of strength and advantages of civilization should make us lenient toward the Indian. The wrong inflicted upon him should be taken into account and the balance placed to his credit. The moral view of the question should be considered and the question asked, Can not the Indian be made a useful and productive member of society by proper training and treatment? If the effort is made in good faith, we will stand better before the civilized nations of the earth and in our own consciences for having made it.76

While Grant’s attitudes and words may not seem enlightened today, wars of near extinction did follow the failure of his policies. Jean Edward Smith argues that Grant should have kept a tighter rein on the military interfacing with tribes in the West, but he was reluctant to second-guess officers in the field. If he had, then perhaps the Battle of Little Big Horn during the last year of Grant’s presidency could have been avoided. But some event of the kind seems inevitable. General George A. Custer’s so-called “last stand” was the fuse that lit the final assault on Native American tribes resisting the pressure to retire to reservations. In the end, then, Grant’s “peace policy” toward Native Americans largely failed, as did his efforts to protect the rights of African Americans. Most recent treatments of his presidency give him credit for trying, as did a contemporary, Frederick Douglass: “To [Grant] more than any other man the Negro owes his enfranchisement and the Indian a humane policy.”77

Civil Service Reform Grant’s efforts toward civil service reform must be understood in terms of the widespread association of scandal with his administration. Consider

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one set of events that links Grant to scandal, however tenuously. Early in his administration Grant thwarted an effort by financiers James Fisk and Jay Gould to manipulate the gold market. Fisk and Gould thought that through the influence of Grant’s brother-in-law, Abel Corbin, they could control Grant’s regulation of the nation’s gold supply. When Grant discovered their conspiracy, he released more gold to defeat their manipulations, and eventually to restore market stability. However, the attempt by the conspirators in itself has contributed to the scandal narrative. But there are other elements to that narrative. The three most well-known are Credit Mobilier, the Whiskey Ring, and the Tweed Ring. Credit Mobilier is the name of a bogus corporation created during the preceding Johnson administration by the directors of the Union Pacific Railroad. Through this vehicle the directors were able to pay themselves handsomely from government contracts. The scandal was uncovered during Grant’s reelection campaign in 1872. Although no one in Grant’s administration had anything to do with the scandal, the name has always been linked to Grant. The story of the Whiskey Ring is more complex and does touch Grant’s administration. For some years before Grant took office, officials in the Treasury Department had been bribed to falsify records of whiskey production to enable distilleries to elude taxes. This was discovered by Grant’s then-secretary of the treasury, Benjamin Bristow. With Grant’s firm support Bristow investigated a number of individuals associated with the affair, including Grant’s personal secretary, Orville Babcock. Babcock was exonerated, but Grant felt that the suspicions that had been aroused during the investigation required Babcock’s demotion. Grant suspected, correctly, that Bristow, driven by his own presidential ambitions, had been irresponsible in his accusations about those involved in the Whiskey Ring. Subsequently he accepted Bristow’s resignation. But Bristow’s accusations became part of the scandal story. The Tweed Ring was a purely municipal matter in New York City, and involved among others, James Fisk and Jay Gould. It was exposed during the Grant administration. In fact, Grant appointed one of those who broke the ring in 1870, Edward Pierrepont, as his attorney general in 1875. Again, the mere fact that the ring became known during Grant’s administration has associated his name with scandal. Two other scandals more directly involved members of Grant’s official family. Grant’s treasury secretary (prior to Bristow), William Richardson, contracted with an associate named Richard Sanborn to collect delinquent taxes. Sanborn’s dealings were corrupt and he was dismissed. Richardson’s judgment and oversight were questioned, resulting in his reassignment by

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Grant. Some historians fault Grant for not firing Richardson outright in order to make a more resounding statement in opposition to corruption. The matter touching Grant most closely involved Secretary of War William Belknap, who appointed a friend of his wife, Caleb Marsh, to a lucrative Indian trading post position in Oklahoma. Marsh concocted a deal with the incumbent, John Evans, whereby Evans paid him $12,000 a year so that Evans could keep his position. Marsh gave half of these payments to Mrs. Belknap. Mrs. Belknap soon died, but the money kept coming to Belknap’s second wife, his first wife’s sister. Belknap was about to be impeached when he offered his resignation, which Grant immediately accepted. There was a trial in Congress nevertheless, but Belknap was acquitted by the Senate on the grounds that a private individual could not rightfully be so tried. Some historians have argued that Grant should have let the impeachment proceedings play out before accepting Belknap’s resignation. This affair contributes significantly to the Grant administration’s reputation for scandal. The Richardson and Belknap matters should be evaluated in comparison to the performance of Grant’s many appointees as a group, and in comparison to similar events in other administrations. I believe that a fair overall appraisal shows that official behavior during the Grant administration was no worse than in others, and for reasons that can only be understood in terms of political psychology, the negative aspects of that behavior have not only been exaggerated, but have inexplicably eclipsed most observers’ consideration of any other aspect of Grant’s administrations. Grant’s efforts toward civil service reform stand in vivid contrast to what many people believe about corruption in his administration. At the end of the Civil War more than fifty thousand people were employed in the federal bureaucracy, mostly in the Treasury and Post Office departments. Since the time of Andrew Jackson most appointments to such positions were made on a political basis, the so-called spoils system. While John Quincy Adams had wanted appointments based on merit, no president in the interim had worried about the spoils system. Grant initially did not address the issue, but in response to urgings from his secretary of the interior, Jacob Cox, as well as vocal advocates of reform, many of whom would have said less about the matter had they been appointed to the federal positions to which they aspired, Grant came to believe that future appointments should be made more on the basis of merit than had past appointments. The president addressed the issue in his second annual message to Congress, in December 1870: “Always favoring practical reforms, I respectfully call your

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attention to one abuse of long standing which I would like to see remedied by this Congress. It is a reform of the civil service of the country. . . . The present system does not secure the best men, and often not even fit men, for public place. The elevation and purification of the civil service of the Government will be hailed with approval by the whole people of the United States.”78 And in his third annual message Grant repeated: It has been the aim of the Administration to enforce honesty and efficiency in all public offices. . . . If bad men have secured places, it has been the fault of the system established by law and custom for making appointments. . . . A civil service reform which can correct this abuse is much desired. . . . In my message to Congress one year ago I urgently recommended a reform in the civil service of the country. In conformity with that recommendation, Congress . . . gave the necessary authority to the Executive to inaugurate a civil-service reform, and placed upon him the responsibility of doing so. Under the authority of said act I convened a board of gentlemen eminently qualified for the work to devise rules and regulations to effect the needed reform. Their labors are not yet complete, but it is believed that they will succeed in devising a plan that can be adopted to the great relief of the Executive, the heads of Departments, and members of Congress, and which will redound to the true interest of the public service. At all events, the experiment shall have a fair trial.79

Despite Grant’s urgings and its own limited action, there was no deep interest in Congress for this matter. In his 1874 message, Grant challenged the Congress to act. The system needed better funding. “The rules adopted to improve the civil service of the Government have been adhered to as closely as has been practicable with the opposition with which they meet,” Grant wrote. “The effect, I believe, has been beneficial on the whole, and has tended to the elevation of the service. But it is impractical to maintain them without direct and positive support of Congress. . . . Under these circumstances, therefore, I announce that if Congress adjourns without positive legislation on the subject. . . . I will regard such action as a disapproval of the system, and will abandon it.”80 With Congress’s inaction, civil service reform died until the passage of the Pendleton Act of 1883, during the presidency of Chester A. Arthur. That act, influenced greatly by what Grant had done, was prompted by the second presidential assassination in sixteen years, that of James A. Garfield, by a man who did not receive the patronage position he desired. It is remarkable that Grant was at least able to put civil service reform into play given the resistance and inertia inspired by the benefits of the spoils system. It may seem odd that it was in the Grant administration, known

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for scandal more than anything else, that civil service reform got its only real push until Garfield’s death catalyzed vigorous action. While Grant may rightly be faulted for extending more loyalty to appointees than he should have, he truly believed in making appointments based on merit, and for establishing a system that would make that happen.

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noble exit”: grant and the disputed election of 1876

The role that President Grant played in resolving the disputed election of 1876 stands as one of his greatest contributions to the preservation of our system of government. In the aftermath of the election between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, Grant was open to discussion with both campaigns. He simply insisted that a fair method of counting the votes be devised by Congress. The Congress acted in midDecember 1876, and passed legislation for an electoral commission to decide the outcome. On January 29, Grant wrote to the Senate: I follow the example heretofore occasionally permitted to communicating in this mode my approval of the act to provide for and regulate the counting of votes for President and Vice-President . . . for the term commencing March 4, a.d. 1877. For the first time in the history of the country . . . a dispute exists with regard to the result of the election of the Chief Magistrate of the nation. . . . In a case whereas now the result is involved, it is the highest duty of the law-making power to provide in advance a constitutional, orderly, and just method of executing the Constitution in this most interesting and critical of its provisions. . . . The country is agitated. It needs and it desires peace and quiet and harmony between all parties and all sections; its industries are arrested, labor unemployed, capital idle, and enterprise paralyzed by reason of the doubt and anxiety attending the uncertainty of a double claim to the Chief Magistracy of the nation. It wants to be assured that the result of the election will be accepted without resistance from the supporters of the disappointed candidate, and that its highest officer shall not hold his place with a questioned title of right. Believing that the bill will secure these ends, I give it my signature.81

Once again Grant was firm and fair. Once again he pressed his wish for peace and harmony between all parties. His unquestioned personal integrity and resoluteness helped the country accept the final outcome, the inauguration of Hayes, like later Republicans Benjamin Harrison and George W. Bush, the loser of the popular vote.

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conclusion Grant’s presidency dealt with a much broader range of issues than is typically recognized. While he was no orator, his written rhetoric provides a full and clear account of his priorities, and the energy and determination that he committed to their fulfillment. Grant’s basic temperament was calm, reserved, warm, and unassuming. His rhetoric reflects those qualities, emphasizing tranquility, security, freedom, basic fairness, and our common nationality and humanity. In treating such issues as civil rights, civil service reform, arbitration, and fair treatment of Native Americans, it seems in many ways quite far-sighted. He steered the way toward these and other important goals with calm but resolute command. The overall results of Grant’s rhetoric are mixed. His consistent and insistent push for specie payment and hard money eventually prevailed when his 1874 veto of the Inflation Bill was sustained, and when the Resumption Act was passed shortly thereafter. His steady advocacy of negotiation and arbitration bore fruit in international relations. Thus his leadership produced peace with other nations and, eventually, prosperity at home. Finding the way to secure peace at home for all citizens was much more elusive, and ultimately he failed to protect the rights of African Americans and Native Americans. It took the nation nearly a century to catch up with Grant’s deeply held convictions about better ways to treat members of those groups. Finally, it is ironic that Grant became seriously engaged with civil service reform during his second year in office, ultimately failed to achieve lasting change, and then saw his administration blamed for a number of corruption scandals, some of which had nothing to do with his presidency. While there was hardly more corruption during the Grant administration than during other administrations in the nineteenth century, history has focused on what did occur to the exclusion of most everything else. Fortunately, the historical record is reflecting new assessments of the performance of this most intriguing president.

coda: personal memoirs of u. s. grant In contrast to his often constricted presidential rhetoric, the flow of Grant’s monumental Memoirs is noticeably more soothing. It is difficult to convey the impact of their graceful, gentle but commanding prose. Yet one feels Grant’s deep wish for peace, and his respect for his adversaries. A passage written in the last days of Grant’s life tells of the day after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox:

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Before leaving, however, I thought I would like to see General Lee again; so next morning I rode out beyond our lines towards his headquarters preceded by a bugler and a staff-officer carrying a white flag. Lee soon mounted his horse, seeing who it was, and met me. We had there between the lines, sitting on horseback, a very pleasant conversation of over half an hour, in the course of which Lee said that the South was a big country and that we might have to march over it three or four times before the war entirely ended, but that we would now be able to do it as they could no longer resist us. He expressed it as his earnest hope, however, that we would not be called upon to cause more loss and sacrifice of life; but he could not foretell the result. I then suggested to General Lee that there was not a man in the Confederacy whose influence with the soldiery and the whole people was as great as his, and that if he would now advise the surrender of all the armies I had no doubt his advice would be followed with alacrity. But Lee said, he could not do that without consulting the President first. I knew there was no use to urge him to do anything against his ideas of what was right.82

Although Grant did not urge Lee further in this instance, like Lincoln he consistently urged the people of the United States “to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”83 That goal has never been fully achieved. But Grant’s efforts in that direction defined his presidency.

notes 1. Nathan Newman, “Ulysses Grant: Our Greatest President?” www.tpmcafe.com/blog/ coffeehouse/2006/jul/04/ulyssesgrantougreatestpresiden. 2. Arthur R. Schlesinger Jr., “The Ultimate Approval Rating,” The New York Times Magazine, December 15, 1996, 8. 3. Kevin Baker, “Ulysses S. Grant: Shocked and Awed,” Review of Josiah Bunting III, Ulysses S. Grant and Michael Korda, Ulysses S. Grant: The Unlikely Hero. New York Times Book Review, November 14, 2004, 13; Josiah Bunting III, Ulysses S. Grant (New York: Henry Holt, 2004); Michael Korda, Ulysses S. Grant: The Unlikely Hero (New York: Harper Collins, 2004); Nathan Newman, Ulysses Grant: Our Greatest President?; Frank Scaturro, President Grant Reconsidered (Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1999); Jean Edward Smith, Grant (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001); Jonathan Yardley, “Ulysses S. Grant. Review of Josiah Bunting III, Ulysses S. Grant,” and Michael Korda, Ulysses S. Grant: The Unlikely Hero, Washington Post, September 19, 2004. 4. Thomas Frank, “A Distant Mirror,” New York Times, August 15, 2006, A19. 5. James McPherson, Review of Grant: A Biography by William S. McFeely, Civil War History 27 (1981): 362–66; Brooks Simpson, “Butcher? Racist? An Examination of William S. McFeely’s Grant: A Biography,” Civil War History 33 (1987): 63–83. 6. John A. Carpenter, Ulysses S. Grant (New York: Twayne Publishing, 1970). 7. Bunting, Ulysses S. Grant, 1.

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8. Scaturro, President Grant Reconsidered, 5. 9. Edward G. Longacre, General Ulysses S. Grant: The Soldier and the Man (Cambridge, Mass.: DaCapo Press, 2006); Brooks Simpson, Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph Over Adversity (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000). 10. McFeely, Grant: A Biography, 430. 11. Bunting, Ulysses S. Grant; McPherson, “Review of Grant”; Newman, Ulysses Grant; Scaturro, President Grant Reconsidered; Simpson, “Butcher? Racist?”; Smith, Grant. 12. Simpson, “Butcher? Racist?” 81. 13. Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Vol. II (New York: Charles L. Webster, 1885), 32. 14. Smith, Grant, 627; Gertrude Stein, Four In America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1947). 15. Dean Keith Simonton, “Presidential Personality: Biographical Use of the Gough Adjective Check List,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51 (1986): 149–60; Dean Keith Simonton, “Presidential Style: Personality, Biography, and Performance,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 55 (1988): 928–36. 16. Simonton, “Presidential Personality,” 153. 17. Dean Keith Simonton, “Presidential IQ, Openness, Intellectual Brilliance, and Leadership: Estimates and Correlations for 41 U.S. Chief Executives,” Political Psychology 27 (2006): 511–26. 18. Bunting, Ulysses S. Grant, 16. 19. Ibid. 20. John Keegan, The Mask of Command (New York: Viking, 1987). 21. Horace Porter, Campaigning with Grant (New York: Century, 1897). 22. Keegan, The Mask of Command, 200–201. 23. Mark Perry, Grant and Twain (New York: Random House, 2004), 234. 24. Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Vol II (New York: Charles L. Webster, 1886), 492. 25. Ibid., 495. 26. Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic Books, 1983). 27. Bunting, Ulysses S. Grant, 153. 28. Dean Keith Simonton, Why Presidents Succeed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987). 29. Bunting, Ulysses S. Grant; Scaturro, President Grant Reconsidered. 30. John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, Vols. 1–18 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 264. 31. James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Vol. VII (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of National Heritage, 1911), 6–7. 32. Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 7. 33. Ibid., 29. 34. Ibid., 244. 35. Smith, Grant, 577. 36. Simon, Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 25, 65. 37. Ibid., 65–66. 38. Ibid., 25, 66. 39. Richardson, Messages and Papers, 269. 40. Ibid. 41. Smith, Grant, 579. 42. Ibid., 580, n700.

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43. Ibid., 580. 44. Ibid., 576. 45. Richardson, Messages and Papers, 316. 46. Carpenter, Ulysses S. Grant, 134. 47. Smith, Grant, 582. 48. Simon, Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 16, 7–8. 49. Ibid., 16, 228. 50. Richardson, Messages and Papers, 8. 51. Simon, Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 20, 15–16. 52. Richardson, Messages and Papers, 55–56. 53. Ibid., 221. The reader will notice that Grant’s hopes for civil rights were not realized until 1964, more than ninety years after his second inaugural. 54. Richardson, Messages and Papers, 189–90. 55. Simon, Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 21, 218–19. 56. Ibid., 246. 57. Richardson, Messages and Papers, 134. 58. Simon, Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 26, 7–8. 59. Ibid., 27, 330. 60. Bunting, Ulysses S. Grant, 106. 61. Ibid., 102. 62. Richardson, Messages and Papers, 8. 63. Ibid., 102. 64. Ibid., 143. 65. John Russell Young, Around the World with General Grant (New York: American News Company, 1879), 50, quoted in Scaturro, President Grant Reconsidered, 54. 66. Young, Around the World with General Grant, 120, quoted in Scaturro, President Grant Reconsidered, 54. 67. Richardson, Messages and Papers, 65. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid., 69. 70. Ibid., 8. 71. Smith, Grant, 541. 72. Ibid., 522. 73. Lee referred to him as the only true American in the room. 74. Richardson, Messages and Papers, 39. 75. Ibid., 152. 76. Ibid., 212. 77. Frederick Douglass, The Frederick Douglass Papers, Vol. 5 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), quoted in Scaturro, President Grant Reconsidered, 105. 78. Richardson, Messages and Papers, 109. 79. Ibid., 154–55. 80. Ibid., 300–301. 81. Simon, Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 28, 143–45. 82. Grant, Personal Memoirs, II, 497. 83. Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865.

The Challenges of Reunification: Rutherford B. Hayes on the Close Race and the Racial Divide amy r. slagell

In most U.S. history textbooks Rutherford B. Hayes ranks neither among the famous nor the infamous of the U.S. presidents; in short, he ranks among the lesser known. However, the controversy surrounding the 2000 presidential election gave him a sudden surge of fame as reporters dug into the history of contested elections. Near the end of November 2000, John Judis wrote in The New Republic that though “it may be weeks until we know who our next president will be, . . . this year’s election has already produced one clear winner: Rutherford B. Hayes. Even when Hayes was president, it’s doubtful he got as much ink as he has this past week, as historians and pundits have drawn countless comparisons between this year’s presidential contest and the one in 1876.”1 In the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876 reporters found a good story; it supplied intrigue, back room deals, special legislation, filibusters, and competing claims of fraud along with voter intimidation. Here was ample room for comparison, for contrast, and for assurances for the American people that even in the context of unrest among recent battlefield combatants, even with soldiers deployed in the capital cites of two states, even in a situation where the outcome of the presidential election was not decided until days before the scheduled inauguration of the new president, there was no serious destabilization of the government; there were no armed

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hostilities and the U.S. system of government with its tradition of the peaceful transition of power, was sustained. In fact, the American people, in time, seemed to have forgotten about the controversy. Samuel Tilden receded from memory, his name little more than a footnote in the record of presidential election curiosities. Nevertheless, from November 1876 to March 1877 and beyond, the election created a complex exigency demanding a rhetorical response from Hayes. The controversy surrounding the election exacerbated the still unhealed separation between North and South and at the same time created new divisions within the political parties themselves. Such periods of unrest often give rise to remarkable rhetorical feats, but in the corpus of Rutherford B. Hayes we find no single startling masterpiece. However, we do find a rhetoric responsive to the needs of the immediate situation, a discourse aimed at reconciliation and the reestablishment of the Union, and a creative effort by an intelligent mind to use all manner of persuasive tools to bring about those goals. Because so little attention has been paid to the discourse of Hayes, this essay is one of recovery. Concentrating on the first ten months of his administration, this essay demonstrates that Hayes’s early presidential discourse is preoccupied with healing the divisions in the nation that were caused from the fallout of the war and from the controversial election. Hayes confronts the divisions within the nation and at the same time offers a vision of a united nation in the future. This reunion is built upon the almost contradictory notions of remembering and returning to the fraternal relations of the nation’s past and the principles of the Founders, while forgetting the most recent past. Hayes stakes his rhetorical success largely upon an appeal to uphold the Constitution as the articulation of the binding principles of union, as the sacred document of the past. But the appeal is confounded by the reality that the Reconstruction amendments, those freeing all who had been held in slavery, and enfranchising the men, were innovations questioned by many throughout the nation. Hayes’s concern for the rights of African American citizens seems sincere, but protecting those rights with arms would threaten the vision of reunion that he also held dear. Hayes’s solution seems to have been to protect their rights with rhetoric instead of arms— to articulate over and over the necessity, the justice, of upholding the new amendments. Though a clear proponent of the rule of law, Hayes seemed to recognize that attitude change was a necessary first step to successful enforcement of these laws. In this sense, Hayes’s use of executive power took a clear rhetorical turn.

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In this chapter I will explore this rhetorical turn. After a brief summary of the historical context concerning the contested election, I will turn to a detailed discussion of three of Hayes’s discourses: his letter of acceptance of the nomination, his inaugural address, and, finally, a series of addresses given during his remarkable tour through the southern states in September of 1877.

the disputed election For the record, Samuel Tilden, not Rutherford B. Hayes, won the popular vote during the election of 1876. The best available numbers put Tilden ahead by over 250,000 in the count of the popular vote. In the Electoral College, Tilden had clear title to 184 votes. Unfortunately for him, 185 were needed to clinch the presidency. Hayes had clear title to 165 electoral votes. There were 20 electoral votes that were in dispute; resolution of controversy over one elector in Oregon and over two sets of conflicting Electoral College returns from Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida was needed before victory could be claimed by either candidate. Though Hayes was at first resigned to his defeat, by November 12 he recorded in his diary his belief that “a fair election in the South would undoubtedly have given us a large majority of the electoral votes, and a decided preponderance of the popular vote.”2 As days stretched to weeks and the election remained unresolved a Hayes victory became increasingly possible. If the fall of 2000 seemed like a time of national stress and insecurity, consider the situation in 1876 when the year came to an end with no resolution of the presidential race. The machinations of both parties during the dispute make for fascinating reading, but need not be reviewed here. In the end it was necessary for Congress to pass a new law to resolve the dispute. The law created a special Election Commission to decide the disputed votes. Composed of five members of the House, five of the Senate, and five Supreme Court justices, the committee was intended to be politically neutral with equal numbers of Democratic and Republican Senators, and two justices from each party, who then chose the fifth Justice. Nevertheless, by party-line votes of 8 to 7 the Commission awarded each of the disputed electors to Hayes. Democratic congressmen threatened recourse to a filibuster to avoid approving the results of the Commission. The filibuster was supposedly avoided by what has been called “the compromise of 1877” which was hammered out by several men “in rooms at Wormley’s Hotel.”3

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The features of this so-called compromise have been debated by several historians. According to Allan Peskin, for many decades the compromise was summarized as follows: “Hayes agreed to abandon the Republican state governments in Louisiana and South Carolina while southern Democrats agreed to abandon the filibuster and thus trade off the presidency in exchange for the end of Reconstruction.” In the 1950s, historian C. Van Woodward’s Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction put forth a lengthy case that focused not on the Wormley meeting, but on other, more complex, negotiations going on at the same time. Woodward argued that this compromise, because it involved “the destinies of millions of people and areas of continental expanse” ought to be recognized as a piece of diplomacy as important to peace between sections of the nation as were the Compromises of 1820 or 1850. However, Woodward’s assertions have been carefully dissected by Allan Peskin, who maintains that “a deal whose major terms are never carried out appears suspiciously like no deal at all.” He further argues that most of the parts of the so-called compromise reflect issues that, if Tilden had won, would have followed in any event. In other words, the South stood to gain so much from a Democratic victory that there was no reason for southern Democrats to concoct a deal to benefit Hayes if Tilden had stood any chance at all of being elected. 4 Though Hayes did not participate in any of the discussions, and though Woodward’s notions of a complex, multifaceted compromise may not hold up, clearly private conversations took place that facilitated the collapse of the congressional filibuster—a filibuster which had persisted until the morning of March 1,1877. This allowed the vote count from the Election Commission to go forward so that Hayes’s election was approved and the inauguration could follow, first in a private ceremony on March 3 and then in a public ceremony on March 5. The irregularities in the electoral process, however, have in many ways clung to Hayes both during the years of his presidency as well as in current discussions of his presidency. The simplified and accusatory conclusion about the outcome of the compromise is clearly stated in Judis’s recent New Republic essay: “At a private meeting of party leaders in February at the Wormley Hotel in Washington, Democrats acquiesced to Hayes’s election in exchange for Republican promises to withdraw federal troops from the South. In effect, Republicans traded the presidency for the disenfranchisement of Southern blacks.” A similar assessment of Hayes is even more boldly stated in Rayford W. Logan’s The Betrayal of the Negro. Logan calls Hayes “The principal presidential architect of the consolidation of white supremacy in the South.”5

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Clearly issues of race, both the issue of a presidential race won without the support of the popular vote and the issue of federal policies toward racial politics in the South, created a significant exigence for Hayes throughout his presidency—an exigence that tested the limits of the changes rhetoric can bring about. How did Hayes respond to the challenge? Through his public discourse and private musings in his diary, especially during the first ten months of his presidency, we can trace the lines of argument and the choices he made to respond to the complexities presented in both senses of the word “race.”

the letter of acceptance Any study of Hayes’s presidential discourse should begin with attention to the letter he composed accepting his nomination by the Republican Party. The principles articulated within the letter, before the complications of the election, are those he stood by throughout his presidency and so suggest an attachment to a course of action that was not swayed in principle by the later events. Hayes often asserted his confidence in the document. In the weeks before the election he mused, “On personal grounds, I find many reasons for thinking defeat a blessing. I should stand by my Letter, I should hew to the line; but what conflicts and annoyances would follow!”6 On February 25, the day that he recorded the results of the Election Commission in his diary and realized that he now had the required 185 electoral votes, he again asserted that, though some southerners in Congress were suspicious of him, “The truth is I stand on my Letter.”7 The letter was, in many ways, a blueprint of the Hayes presidency. It asserted his reliance on the Republican Party platform and noted his particular support for a single term of office for the presidency, for a sound currency (Hayes objected to a shift to specie or what he called an “irredeemable paper currency”), and for secular, not sectarian, control of public education. In addition, the letter was more than half devoted to the two issues of particular importance to Hayes: civil service reform and what he called “the permanent pacification of the country.” Though Hayes’s commitment to civil service reform is perhaps the most important political legacy of his presidency, it is the latter issue that interests us here.8 In the letter, as Hayes took up the issue of settling the remaining issues of the Civil War, or pacification, he carefully articulated the conditions under which he would restore the southern states to “the blessings of honest and capable local government.” With such a phrase he tacitly accepted the

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consensus that had been emerging under the Grant administration, that carpetbagger government, propped up by a distant federal government present only in the form of troops, was too often dishonest and incapable. Grant, his own administration wracked with economic scandal, had clearly reached the conclusion that political reconstruction at the point of the bayonet was an impracticable and dangerous way to maintain a popular government. By the end of the Grant administration, federal troops remained only in South Carolina and Louisiana. Historians have further established the fact that Grant sent orders to withdraw those troops before Hayes took office. For all intents and purposes, Reconstruction was concluded before Hayes came to power. What remained for Hayes was to articulate the terms, the principles, the worldview upon which it was ended. In this sense the early parts of his presidency were essentially rhetorical. While General Sherman halted action on Grant’s order to withdraw, Hayes’s biographer speculates that it was stopped at Hayes request so that he could use the presence of the troops to extort a definite commitment from white southerners to uphold the constitutional rights of the freedmen and southern Republicans before the troops were finally removed.9 The conditions that Hayes felt must be met in the South before that removal were clearly articulated in his letter of acceptance and then reiterated in his inaugural address. This casts doubt on the claim that the “compromise” that had given Hayes the election had determined his southern policy. The letter of acceptance acknowledged Hayes’s and the Republican Party’s interest in pacification but also in “the complete protection of all its citizens in the free enjoyment of all their constitutional rights.” The appeal to the Constitution was paramount in Hayes’s discourse. While he called for recognition of the “supremacy of law” as the prerequisite to peace, he also accused the reconstructed South, where white supremacy was regaining sway, of undermining its own prospects for economic recovery through establishing a system “where the Constitution and the laws are set at defiance.” In other words, Hayes was not content with only the rule of law, but insists on the rule of the Constitution: “All parts of the Constitution are sacred, and must be sacredly observed—the parts that are new no less than the parts that are old,” he held.10 In fact, as we trace the development of Hayes’s thought on the Constitution we can see that he adhered closely to the Republican principles articulated by Lincoln. In the years immediately following the Civil War, he shared his belief that the southern “conspirators” had “taught a false construction of the National Constitution,” by viewing states’ rights as a weapon to be

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“employed to destroy the unity of the nation.”11 It is little wonder that rebuilding national union was, for Hayes, predicated on recognition of the Constitution. His insistence that the whole Constitution deserved sacred status was, of course, necessary since throughout the South there had been objections to the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and especially the Fifteeenth Amendments to that Constitution. The Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed voting rights to the freedmen and empowered Congress to take steps to enforce the amendment, as well as to punish states that interfered with the exercise of voting rights by the threat of not counting the population that was interfered with when establishing the number of seats each state was granted in the U.S. Congress. Hayes’s concern about the lack of respect for the amendments and the challenges facing the black population in the South was longstanding. Before the amendments were passed he raised related issues in several speeches given in Ohio. In an 1867 speech where he dissected various competing plans for Reconstruction, he denounced the Democrats’ plan because it “treats treason as no crime, and loyalty as no virtue” and tended toward the reestablishment “of slavery where it had been disturbed by the war.” The speech continued by defending the broadening of suffrage to all men, white and black. While we may note the entire absence of any expression concerning women’s potential relationship to voting rights, the passage is surprising for its clear articulation of arguments we hear today in discussion about reparations for African Americans. Democrats argue, he began, that if black men ought to be voters in the District of Columbia, in the territories, as well as in the “rebel States,” then white men everywhere would be forced to concede that black men ought to be voters “in Ohio, and in other States of the North.” “Union men,” Hayes continued, “do not question this reasoning. But, if it is urged as an objection to the plan of Congress [for the Fifteeenth Amendment], we reply”: There are now within the limits of the United States about five millions of colored people: they are not aliens or strangers; they are here, not by choice of themselves or of their ancestors; they are here by the misfortune of their fathers and the crime of ours. Their labor, privations, and sufferings, unpaid and unrequited, have cleared and redeemed one-third of the inhabited territory of the Union. Their toil has added to the resources and wealth of the nation untold millions. Whether we prefer it or not, they are our countrymen, and will remain so forever. They are more than countrymen: they are citizens. Free colored men were citizens of the colonies. The Constitution of the United States, formed by our fathers, created no disabilities on account of color. By the acts of our fathers

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amy r. slagell and of ourselves, they bear equally the burdens, and are required to discharge the highest duty, of citizens. They are compelled to pay taxes and to bear arms. They fought side by side with their white countrymen in the great struggle of Independence and in the recent war for the Union.

Hayes continued, citing historical evidence of the wartime contributions of African Americans. Though slaves were never voters, he persisted, “The free colored men were always voters in the colonies. . . . They voted for members of the Congress which declared independence.” Furthermore, our government is not “the white man’s government,” Hayes insisted. “It is not the government of the native-born or of the foreign born, of the rich man or of the poor man, of the white man or of the colored man: it is the government of the freemen.” Through appeals to past fact, to a sense of fairness, as well as to the Constitution as the touchstone by which government policy should be determined, Hayes built a strong case for the enfranchisement of African American men.12 Nearly ten years later, Hayes found himself in the position of arguing for the protection of those rights before a national audience. But the context and his role within it had shifted. Public sentiment among the white majority wanted desperately to put the issues of the Civil War aside. A record of violence, graft, and mismanagement seemed to have been established in the South. The consequences of the economic collapse of 1873 were still felt. Hayes had come to believe, as he expressed in his letter, that “a division of political parties, resting merely upon distinctions of race, or upon sectional lines, is always unfortunate, and may be disastrous.” He sought some way to alter the basis for party division, to make policy decisions about economic issues or public education, rather than fallout from the Civil War and the postwar amendments, provide the basis for party realignment. Aiming to reawaken and join with the old Whigs within the white population throughout the South, he hoped to increase the power of the Republican Party in the South by setting the grounds for a coalition of progressive whites and blacks together as members of the party. But building that coalition would require pacification. Despite his support for protection of African American rights, it is clear that Hayes came to believe that the battle to win these constitutional protections for blacks must be fought not through arms, but through persuasion. At the heart of his persuasive appeal was his call for unity. While pleased with his letter of acceptance, in the midst of the election dispute he confided to his journal his wish that he had given “that part on the Southern question greater emphasis.” In the same entry, he drafted the text of a speech he hoped to deliver before departing Ohio for Washington.

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In it, he clung to the discourse of the letter of acceptance, but also took steps to remedy its shortcomings as to the Southern Question. Beginning with a reassertion of the Constitution’s sacred nature, he planned to say: “What is required is: First, that for the protection and welfare of the colored people, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments shall be sacredly observed and faithfully enforced according to their true intent and meaning.”13 Whereas, in his letter of acceptance, Hayes had vaguely assured southerners that he would “regard and cherish their truest interests,—the interests of the white and of the colored people both and equally,”14 in the speech draft written in the pages of his diary he became more specific. Expressing some sympathy with the southern people who in the wake of “the tremendous revolution” have been left “impoverished and prostrate,” Hayes identified their three basic needs: (1) “economy, honesty and intelligence in their local governments”; (2) the institution of a policy that “will cause sectionalism to disappear, and that will tend to wipe out the color line”; and, finally (3) they need support for “immigration, education, and every description of legitimate business and industry.” After this series of “they need” statements, however, Hayes turned to a reunifying tone: “We do not want a united North nor a united South. We want a united country. And if the great trust shall devolve upon me, I fervently pray that the Divine Being, who holds the destinies of the nations in His hands, will give me wisdom to perform its duties so as to promote the truest and best interests of the whole country.”15

the inaugural address While Hayes apparently never had the opportunity to deliver the speech he had drafted in his journal, the ideas and wording experimented with there clearly informed the development of his inaugural address where nearly 40 percent of the text is devoted to the southern issue. The inaugural reveals Hayes’s careful balancing act. First, it persistently balances the white southerners’ insistence on local government with the demand for full acceptance of the Constitution in letter and spirit. But more than simply recognizing the demands and interests on either side of the question, Hayes attempted to reassert a national interest, a common ground on which a new community could be built. This section of the inaugural was structured with a series of unifying and dividing statements. The first paragraph of the body asserted national unity, noting that “all thoughtful and patriotic citizens regard” reaching a state of

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“permanent pacification” and the “complete protection” of the “constitutional rights” of “all citizens” as the most important issue facing the nation. The next paragraph first admitted the differences among the parties to the controversy. The South continued to suffer from “the tremendous revolution” and did not enjoy the “blessing of wise, honest and peaceful self-government,” so it was different from the North. And, yet, the next move attempted to claim common ground declaring that “such government” was now an “imperative necessity required by all the varied interests.” No doubt the Republican governors of South Carolina and Louisiana, who would be ousted by the competing local Democratic regimes as soon as Hayes proceeded with the planned removal of the federal troops, would probably be among those who disagreed with Hayes’s effort to assert this as common ground. Hayes’s effort to manufacture unity through rhetorical assertion continued with the next sentence that stated as principle what was an issue of contention: “Only a local government which recognizes and maintains inviolate the rights of all is a true self government.”16 The careful balancing of division and unification continued throughout the discussion of southern policy. He spoke of “the two distinct races whose peculiar relations to each other” [note the twist on the “peculiar institution” here] led to current sufferings, and in the next breath called for “government which guards the interests of both races carefully and equally.” Even as the people need to be restored to unity, so does the Constitution need to remain undivided. It must be obeyed “faithfully” as a “whole.” There can be no division of purpose between “the laws of the nation and the laws of the States themselves.” With a devotion to the whole Constitution “beneficent local governments can be built up” on a “sure and substantial foundation.” The question, Hayes said, comes down to an ultimate division—“the question of government or no government,” the return to a peaceful “social order” or “a return to barbarism.” With the prospect of such a fearful division before them, Hayes believed that he could unite the country. All people are interested in resolving the question, he asserted, and on this question “we ought not to be, in a partisan sense, either Republicans or Democrats, but fellowcitizens and fellow men, to whom the interests of a common country and a common humanity are dear.”17 In the wake of this appeal to unity Hayes again identified the root cause of the differences—“the advance of 4,000,000 people from a condition of servitude to that of citizenship, upon an equal footing with their former masters, could not occur without presenting problems.” But again he asserted what he hoped would be taken as a significant point of common ground:

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“That it [emancipation] was a wise, just, and providential act, fraught with good for all concerned, is now generally conceded throughout the country.”18 Furthermore, Hayes insisted that the “moral obligation” of the federal government “to establish the rights of the people it has emancipated and to protect them” in their efforts to exercise those rights, was “also generally admitted.” It is hard to say whether Hayes advanced these claims because he was sure they were true, sure that they should be true, or simply hopeful that saying a thing would make it true. He clearly acknowledged that problems existed, but there was an optimism to his discourse that suggests a kind of rhetoric of delusion, a failure to imagine just how hard the move from servitude to citizenship would be when the master class resisted losing its hold on power. Whatever his intention, the vision of unity was clear, and it was built on transcending the issues that had divided the nation. Hayes declared that he would work “in behalf of a civil policy which will forever wipe out in our political affairs the color line and the distinction between North and South, to the end that we may have not merely a united North or a united South, but a united country.” Clearly, Hayes could not know how long reunification grounded in justice could actually take.19 While rebuilding the unity of the nation is a well-recognized mission common to the genre of the presidential inaugural address, few presidents have faced a more daunting sense of national division than did Hayes.20 The national division over race and over the fallout of the Civil War and Reconstruction were issues of import, but Hayes also needed to respond to the divisive election, one of the most divisive in the nation’s history. The fact of the contentious election presented a significant constraint to the early months of the Hayes administration. Assuming the mantle of the presidency when critics have dubbed you “His Fraudulency” was no easy task. As a result, Hayes made the close presidential race the second central issue of his inaugural. Unlike his supposed contemporary parallel, George W. Bush, who made only one passing and vague reference to the disputed election in his inaugural, Hayes devoted nearly 20 percent of the text to this issue. In the speech Hayes turned this potentially divisive issue into a site for communal celebration and for a recommitment to the rule of law which, as we have seen, was the essential ingredient of his plan for normalizing relations between North and South and between white and black citizens. Hayes’s first move on this issue was to downplay the uncommon circumstances of his rise to office. His inauguration, he said, signaled “the close of a political contest marked by the excitement which usually attends the contests between great political parties. . . . The circumstances,” he insisted, “were,

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perhaps in no respect extraordinary.” The very next sentence, however, belied that statement: “For the first time in the history of the country,” he announced, the presidential decision has been referred to “a tribunal appointed for this purpose.” Hayes continued, singing the praises of the Electoral Commission and insisting that its decision, grounded in careful “research” and “argument,” “was entitled to the fullest confidence of the American people.” Because of the recent nature of the dispute, Hayes was unable to deny that differences of opinion existed as to the outcome, and so he admitted that such a decision, based in “human judgment,” would, of course, be considered “wrong by the unsuccessful party.” Nevertheless, the fact that such a decision could be settled peacefully through discourse “was an occasion for general rejoicing.” Then, using the strategy of stating a thing in order to help make it so, Hayes declared that “Upon one point there is entire unanimity in public sentiment,” once the dispute over the presidency is settled according to the agreed upon procedures, “the general acquiescence of the nation ought surely to follow.” Such acquiescence was a duty and a privilege, suggested the following paragraph, because it gave “to the world the first example” of a great nation with universal suffrage overcoming the clash of parties in a contested election. The suggestion is that the world would marvel when it saw that “party tumults” were hushed and the contest was decided “according to the forms of law.” Hayes used this moment to remind the people of the unifying purpose of the Founding Fathers, that the nation serve as the “shining city upon a hill.”21

the southern speaking tour By admitting the divisions while articulating both a vision of a united nation in the future as well as a list of the principles he asserted were held in agreement across sections, races, and parties, Hayes worked toward reunification. But the master stroke of his plan to use rhetoric and symbolic action to reunite the nation was seen in the trips he took around the country. During the first three years of his presidency he made trips to the following states, visiting some of them more than once: Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, (I found evidence of only one brief stop in Stevenson, Alabama), Georgia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Minnesota, North Dakota, New York, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Kansas, and Connecticut. In the last year of his presidency he became the first sitting president to visit the West Coast; stopping first in Chicago, Illinois, and

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then Utah, the party proceeded westward visiting California, Oregon, and the Washington Territory before returning East with stops in Arizona and New Mexico. That trip, lasting from August 26 to November 6, 1880, kept him absent from the White House for seventy-one days. To criticism that he traveled too much, Hayes replied that the trips were essential. “Eight months of wearying worry over details is enough to kill a strong man,” he explained in a letter to a friend, “Every month a man in this place ought to shake off its oppression.”22 These trips, especially those early in his presidency, were typically for more than relaxation—they were part of his governing strategy. Gerald Gamm and Renee Smith briefly consider Hayes’s speaking tour in August and September during his first year in office in their study of the interaction among presidents, publics, and parties. Identifying Hayes’s trip as “designed to promote his policy of withdrawing federal troops from the South and restoring government control in the southern states to white Democrats,” they criticize his “continued appeals to reconciliation [as] disingenuous, even reckless.”23 Setting aside for a moment the issue of whether the collapse of Reconstruction even belongs at the feet of Hayes, I believe that Gamm and Smith have missed some essential ingredients of Hayes’s trip through the South. Understanding his complex rhetorical effort to reestablish national unity during his southern tour in September 1877 means examining not only the speeches he gave, but also looking at the way Hayes’s entourage mirrored the call for unity and the way Hayes relied on the transactional nature of communication. Though not billed as a “listening tour” as some modern politicians have called their immersions in the polis, Hayes believed that his trip furnished him the opportunity to see the results of his pacification policy. Hayes’s optimism about the success of his call for reunification, based on a firm adherence to everyone’s constitutional rights, was based not only on wishful thinking or bad advice, but on what he had seen with his own eyes and on what he believed about the honorable character of powerful southern men. That Hayes did not grasp the depths of racist feeling nor understand the impossibility of curing it through appeal to the rule of law is certain; that he was insincere in his call for national unity is not.24 In the section to follow we will look first at Hayes’s case for reunification, considering both his explicit appeals and his use of symbolic examples of unity, and then we will note his interest in hearing “feedback” from his audiences and from the southern men with whom he interacted throughout his travels. Hayes’s explicit appeals to unity included a variety of strategies, many of which had at their heart an emphasis on the ties that bound North and

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South. Among those ties were shared principles and, Hayes hoped, shared reverence for the heroes of the Union. In Cincinnati, for example, in response to a very enthusiastic crowd, Hayes interpreted their energy as indicating that they were “attached to the principles of the Government of the United States” as well as “that the people of Cincinnati approve the general course of the Administration.” In Louisville, he repeated the sentiments of his inaugural address, declaring: “I think we can confidently look forward to a fraternal union on the basis of the Constitution as it now is with all the amendments.” While the basis for the Union was made clear with these kinds of statements, Hayes also invoked the shared history of both sections and sang the praises of the Union. In Knoxville, he noted that “Washington announced that the Constitution made us one people. Mr. Webster, coming after said: ‘We have one Constitution; we have one Union; we have one destiny.’ Let us, my friends, bear in mind these great ideas. We may separate from each other as to currency, as to tariff, as to internal improvements, but, my friends, we must all agree with Jackson that the Union must and shall be preserved.” In a somewhat surprising move Hayes also invoked the last line of Lincoln’s first inaugural to an audience in Cincinnati and before an audience in Atlanta he quoted lines from Lincoln’s second inaugural, concerning each side’s effort to ask for God’s blessing during the war.25 A second unifying strategy in the speeches was his call to recognize the interdependence of the sections. He reminded listeners in Cincinnati that “No part of our country can lack prosperity without affecting the prosperity of the whole country, and the prosperity of one section is the prosperity of all sections.” The interconnectedness of the sections was also treated poetically as Hayes attempted to rekindle an American sense of purpose. In Atlanta, he was cheered when he asked the audience, “Why shouldn’t we be at peace for evermore? We are embarked upon the same voyage, upon the same ship, under the same old flag. Good fortune or ill fortune affects you and your children as well as my people and my children.” Quoting from an unidentified English author’s vision of America, Hayes declared in Louisville, “‘I see a vast confederacy stretching from the white billows of the Atlantic to the calm waters of the Pacific main, that would contain one people, one language, and one faith—everywhere a home for freemen and a refuge of every race and every clime to come together.’” Also in Louisville, Hayes made a point of reviewing the particularly high level of interconnectedness between Kentucky and Ohio because of their shared border and history. “The true history of Ohio and Kentucky,” he noted, “is an epitome of all the rest of the country, and now, when the cause is removed, whatever the hostility, whatever the

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prejudice, whatever the estrangement, let them also be removed.” A return to a prosperous economic relationship between Ohio and Kentucky’s border cities, Hayes believed, would be a kind of microcosm of the coming change throughout the rest of the nation as a result of reunification.26 In addition to issues of rearticulating what North and South held in common, Hayes also had to reinterpret the past within a frame that allowed the sections to come together as equals. Hayes seems to have been heavily influenced by Lincoln’s interpretation of the war in the second inaugural address as something beyond the control of either section. In Lynchburg, he declared that anyone who did not see “the hand of Providence” within the outcomes of the Civil War was “not likely to ever notice any providential interference.” In Atlanta, Hayes offered his most extensive treatment of the issue of slavery. In this discussion, we hear echoes of his 1867 address on the issue: “Without any fault of yours, or any fault of mine, or of any one of this great audience, slavery existed in this country. It was in the Constitution of the country. The colored man was here not by his own voluntary action. It was the misfortune of his fathers that he was here. I think it is safe to say that it was by the crime of our fathers that he was here. He was here, however, and we of the two sections differed about what should be done with him.” In this speech, Hayes tried to remove blame for the war and for slavery from the North, the South, and from the slave himself. Because none of those currently living are really culpable for the crime, he seemed to suggest, we can put it behind us.27 In a similar vein, in nearly every speech he gave throughout the South, Hayes worked to take away any stigma on the South for losing the war. As a Union Army man wounded four times during the war, Hayes had to walk carefully around this issue. He always began this section of the address by complimenting the Confederate soldiers: “When the war began our Southern adversaries were a little better prepared for it than we were. We had good marksmen and we had good horsemen, but in proportion to numbers you had a great many more good marksmen and a great many more good horsemen than we had. You were educated as soldiers. We had to learn to ride and to shoot.” In Atlanta, when he really felt the audience with him, he even made humorous reference to his wounds with the aside, “I happen to know how well you could shoot.” The Union soldiers, Hayes would continue, did get trained until “gradually we learned to ride too, and, as some of you know, gradually learned to shoot.” Once the forces were on an equal footing, Hayes would continue, “then the struggle came to be between Greek and Greek. . . . Everybody knows that when the issue comes to that—Greek and

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Greek—that the army will conquer which has the most Greeks. [Laughter and applause.]” The invocation of this, at the time, popular proverb: “When Greek meets Greek, then comes the tug of war,” never failed to produce a positive response from the crowd, according to the newspaper reports of the speeches. Even as Hayes explicitly set the foundation for rebuilding relationships through declining to play the role of victor during the tour, he also created the opportunity for shared laughter to help defuse the tenseness of the occasion.28 In addition to his explicit appeals for unity, Hayes was able to exploit the symbolic value of both the example of the mutual respect among soldiers and the example set by his traveling party. In nearly every speech, Hayes acknowledged the special relationship between the Union and Confederate soldiers who were meeting again on this occasion. In Nashville, he noted: “I am now in the presence of more men of the Confederate than of the Union Army. We at least understand each other; between us there is no shadow.” He often repeated a story passed around Washington about a conversation between General Scott and an unnamed statesman. The statesman imagined that the Civil War would be over in ninety days and that “The very moment that we have victory that is complete and general, there will be peace; that will be the end of it.” But General Scott knew better: “He had the idea that when victory was complete the soldiers would be at peace, but, said he: ‘The trouble is it will take the Government some years to get the belligerent non-combatants to keep the peace.’” With this story Hayes suggested that citizens follow the lead of the soldiers who had learned mutual respect on the field of battle and were now willing to shake hands. Hayes also used the presence of mixed crowds listening to his speeches as an example of what unity looked like. In Atlanta, he noted: “I suppose that here, as everywhere else, I am in the presence of men of both great political parties; I am speaking also in the presence of citizens of both races. I am quite sure that there are before me very many of the brave men who fought in the Confederate Army [Applause.]; some doubtless of the men who fought in the Union Army [Applause.]; and here we are, Republicans, Democrats, colored people, white people, Confederate soldiers and Union soldiers, all of one mind and one heart today. [Immense cheering.]”29 It was not only the crowds that instantiated Hayes call for unity, but also his traveling companions. Hayes traveled with his entire cabinet on this tour. There is not space to detail Hayes’s problems with Congress over cabinet appointments, but the way that Hayes handled the conflict is often noted as evidence that his presidency served to restore power to the executive office.

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The most interesting of Hayes’s appointments were those of Carl Schurz, a strong-minded reformer, to the Interior and David M. Key of Tennessee as Postmaster General. The appointment of Key, a southern Democrat, may have been part of the behind-the-scenes bargaining that had smoothed Hayes’s way into office. In any event, it meant that fully a third of government civil service appointments were under the control of a southern Democrat. Key traveled with the rest of the cabinet and along with them was introduced to the cheering crowds. In this way Hayes was able to display how the federal government was learning to work together across sectional and even party boundaries for the good of the nation as a whole. Even more surprising was the presence of Wade Hampton on the train throughout much of the tour. Hampton was the new Democratic governor of South Carolina, whose rise to the office had been facilitated by Hayes’s final acceptance of withdrawal of federal troops from that state capital. Hampton offered a ringing endorsement of Hayes’s transcendent vision at several of the stops. In Chattanooga, Hayes introduced Hampton, who told the crowd that he had gone to Louisville to greet the President “on Southern soil as a Southern man, and I recognized in him a man higher than a party man, [Applause.] a man who had forgotten that he was a party man as he rose to be a patriot.” Hampton’s acceptance of Hayes further legitimized his presidency and offered southerners a chance to be assured by one of their heroes that Hayes had “shown that the men who fought each other can meet in peace and fraternity without any loss of respect.”30 Traveling with Key, Hampton, and occasionally with other Confederate officers who, the papers reported, gave Hayes detailed accounts of battles fought on sites they could view from the train, showed audiences in concrete terms that reunification was possible. Hayes, on occasion, strengthened this visual message with an explicit discussion of his lack of bias in dealing with people. “When a committee of working men comes to me,” he explained in Knoxville, “I am glad to receive them; if of colored men, I experience the same feeling; if of Democrats, they receive the same attention; and with Republicans it is the same, for we believe that the Government of the United States ought to regard alike the rights and interests of all sections of country, and that State Governments, as well as the National Government, should regard equally the rights and interests of all races of men.” In this way Hayes claimed his trustworthiness and at the same time called on his listeners to follow suit in their treatment of all races.31 Hayes was well aware of the rhetorical value of his trip and even acknowledged the role of the press in increasing this value. When he spoke in

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Nashville he addressed these issues directly. “We trust that our visiting the different States will perhaps in some degree increase the social intercourse between them; perhaps it will tend also to increase business intercourse between them—will tend somewhat through the report of these proceedings to increase the opportunity of the people of all the states to know each other, and strengthen their friendship for each other.” Hayes knew that not only would his trip to the South allow these particular parties to learn about each other, but because of newspaper coverage of the trips the whole nation could be exposed to the thoughts, ideas, and customs of each section. It is clear from some references in the speeches that Hayes’s party was carefully following the press coverage of the tour and that awareness led him to consciously address multiple audiences. In Knoxville, Hayes declared, “I want the people of all sections to be better acquainted; I want the people of all sections to be introduced to each other; not exactly as the soldiers have been, but to be friends as the soldiers here are friends; and one of the great objects of this tour is to encourage intercourse between different sections of the country.” Once again we see the fraternal relations of the soldiers held up as an example of unity worthy of imitation.32 The final rhetorical purpose of the southern tour was grounded in Hayes’s interest in gathering information directly from the region about black and white citizens’ reactions to his southern policy. At times he asked his entire audience for the same kinds of assurances concerning protections for African Americans that he and his agents had insisted on getting from individual southern leaders before Hayes permitted the withdrawal of the last of the federal troops. In Louisville, he asked: “My friends, my confederates, do you intend to obey the whole Constitution and the amendments? [Applause.] I thought you would; I believe you will, and that removes the last cause of dissension between us.” Such audience interaction corroborated what Hayes had hoped to hear and he continued to seek such confirmation throughout his tour. For example, in Atlanta he clearly articulated the sort of quid pro quo that perhaps underlay the so-called Compromise of 1877: “I believe it is the duty of the General Government to regard equally and alike the interests and rights of all sections of the country. [Cheers.] I am glad you agree with me about that. I believe further that it is the duty of the Governments to regard alike and equally the rights and interests of all classes of citizens. [Cheers.] That covers the whole matter; that wipes out in the future in our politics the section line forever. [Cheers.] Let us wipe out in our politics the color line forever. [Cheers.]” In Knoxville, Hayes looked for similar confirmation noting that the crowd had assembled to “exhibit their devotion to

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the nation, to the laws and to the Constitution.” When he was suddenly interrupted by someone in the crowd shouting: “Hurrah for Tilden,” Hayes, without missing a beat, replied: “They expect also to show their attachment to freedom of speech, of which we have examples from time to time.” He was rewarded for his humorous effort with laughter and applause. His response allowed him to reassert support for the Constitution and add to his ethos by demonstrating that he could not be baited by references to Tilden. Near the end of his speech in Atlanta, Hayes addressed the whole issue of “the bargain” directly. He began by noting the widespread impression that his hand was forced as to his policy of pacification. He admitted that he did act under compulsion but, he added, “I was compelled to it by my sense of duty, under my oath of office. [Intense enthusiasm and cheers.] What was done by us was done, not merely by force of special circumstances, but because we believed it was just and right to do it. [Cheers.]” But once again Hayes’s action served as a model for the behavior of his listeners. Picking up the label “patriot” from Hampton’s description of his effort to transcend party loyalties, Hayes called explicitly for reunification: “Now, let us come together; let each man make up his mind to be a patriot in his own home and place.”33 Probably the most significant moment for Hayes on the tour in terms of his effort to be engaged in two-way communication came in Chattanooga when the Reverend A.P. Milton joined the party on the platform to offer his speech of welcome. Milton, a black man, spoke “in behalf of the colored citizens of Chattanooga and vicinity.” Offering an image of Hayes as a sun that rose “above the horizon to shed his rays over this vast domain,” Milton noted that these rays of light “were first mistaken by some, and regarded with disfavor by others; but in the onward approach of that sun the clouds have disappeared. That bright anticipation of prosperity in the near future is warranted in the already returning peace, unity, and kindly feeling to us at least in this part of the State.” Milton assured Hayes that the black population “highly appreciate[d] the precedent of your Administration” and that they have “unwavering confidence in that which is to follow, believing that you will endeavor to do that which will result in the greater good to us, not as colored or white, rich or poor, high or low, but as citizens of the United States.” Hayes’s response to Milton indicated his relief and delight at hearing such confirmation. Noting that his greatest concern on implementing the policy was “the probable condition of the colored people,” Hayes said that his “desire was, as was that of all associated with me in the Government, as it is the desire I am sure of all good citizens, that the colored people would be safe and secure in all their rights under the Constitution as it is, and under

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the laws of the land. [Applause.]” Deeply gratified by Milton’s welcome, Hayes added that “the testimony which this address bears to me of the condition of the colored men in this part of the United States since the policy of peace and harmony has been adopted is indeed very satisfactory. . . . It is precisely in accord with what I believed would occur when the effort to give to the country complete and permanent pacification was made.”34 Hayes was deeply satisfied with himself upon returning toward Washington. At one of his last stops on the way home he told an audience in Charlottesville, Virginia, that what “rejoices me more than anything else is the fact that everywhere we have found growing and increasing sentiments in behalf of the Union, the Constitution, and the Administration which regards alike the interest and rights of every section and every State; which regards alike and equally all classes without distinction of race or color. The equality under the laws of all citizens is the corner-stone of the structure of restored harmony from which ancient friendship is to rise.”35 While Hayes had always believed that his policy of pacification would encourage such feelings, after his trip he felt he had ample justification for persisting in his optimistic perspective. Upon his return to Washington he recorded in his diary the following assessment of his trip: “Received everywhere heartily. The country is again one and united! I am very happy to be able to feel that the course taken has turned out so well.”36

conclusion Though newspaper coverage and reports from a variety of people would eventually lead Hayes to temper his optimism, he remained unshakable in his belief that the nation as a whole and the vast majority of individuals within the nation, including the freedmen, were better off after the pacification policy was enacted. A “salutary change in the minds of the people has begun,” he declared in his first annual message to Congress. Individuals were “substituting for suspicion, distrust, and aversion, concord, friendship, and patriotic attachment to the Union.”37 By his second annual message Hayes found himself reviewing the past, recalling the assurances of “the former slaveholding States,” that the new amendments “should in good faith be enforced, rigidly and impartially, in letter and spirit.” However, the hope that this would actually occur had been dashed in some places during the fall elections. In some states, he confessed, “the rights of the colored voters have been overridden and their participation in the elections not permitted

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to be either general or free.” As a result Hayes began to ask for appropriations for the courts and for the executive to “enforce the laws” and to “secure the conviction and just punishment of the guilty.”38 If Hayes’s most recent biographer, Ari Hoogenboom, is correct in arguing that the actual steps taken within Hayes’s southern policy—such as pulling out the federal troops and allowing the Democratic Party to regain control in South Carolina and Louisiana—were virtually inevitable and would have happened under Grant (should he have tried a third term) or under Tilden, then we are rightly drawn to investigate the rhetoric with which he implemented that policy. Within that discourse Hayes did have choices, many of which we have examined. His balanced rhetoric that responded to the demand for local control of government throughout the entire nation yet persistently demanded protection of African American rights was ultimately unsuccessful and allowed the culture of violence evident in lynching, Jim Crow law, and disenfranchisement on account of race to gain traction.39 But his continued assertion of the American ideal of equality and justice before law and the supremacy and binding power of the Constitution did help to restore a sense of national unity and kept relevant a discourse of citizenship rights that would be exploited by women and later by African Americans during the Civil Rights movement. How do we judge these mixed results? In his New Republic essay contrasting the election of 1876 with the election of 2000, John Judis calls the elections “opposites.” With subtle antithetical structure he declares: “In 1876, the country couldn’t decide on a president because the divisions between the parties were so great. This year, the country can’t decide on a president because the divisions are so small.”40 The differences between the candidates in 1876 were significant and Hayes’s willingness to at least address the crucial issues of the divisions arising out of the disputed presidential race and out of racial politics in the South deserves attention. Still, upon taking office, both Hayes and George W. Bush faced similar challenges. They needed to establish credibility and to restore unity. Bush aimed to accomplish this task through war—through his response to terrorist attacks and his creation of a sustained agenda for a war to “rid the world of evil.” Hayes did it by averting war, yet tacitly accepting the evils of continued violence and oppression of African Americans. By substituting the rhetoric of principles for the presence of arms and attempting to bind the nation together through the principles of the Constitution, Hayes avoided a new outbreak of civil war, but left to future generations the task of unleashing “the better angels of our nature.”

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notes 1. John Judis, “Making Hayes—Why Election 2000 is the Opposite of 1876,” The New Republic, November 27, 2000, 10. 2. Diary entry, November 12, 1876, in The Diary and Letters of Rutherford B. Hayes, Nineteenth President of the United States, Vol. III, ed. Charles Richard Williams (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State Archeological and Historical Society, 1922), 377, online version: http:// www.ohiohistory.org/onlinedoc/hayes/index.cfm. Entries for later references to this source will be noted with the date of the entry and the page number in this volume. 3. Ari Hoogenboom, Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior and President (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 292–93. 4. Woodward, quoted in Allen Peskin, “Was There a Compromise of 1877?” The Journal of American History 60 (1973): 64–65; Peskin, 65. 5. Judis, “Making Hayes,” 10; Rayford Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro (New York: Collier, 1954, rpt. 1965), 23. 6. Diary and Letters of Rutherford B. Hayes, October 22, 1876, 370. 7. Ibid., February 25, 1877, 421. 8. Some political scientists have popularized the notion that Hayes’s advances along this line, while limited due to congressional objections, nevertheless “laid the groundwork for reform that allowed successors such as William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt” to move forward. See Jeremy Plant, “Deja Vu: Revisiting the 1876 Presidential Election,” USA Today Magazine, May 2001, 18. In the letter, Hayes broaches the spoils system with a surprising directness, noting that civil service positions had “become not merely rewards for party services, but rewards for services to party leaders.” Denounced as tending toward “extravagance,” “official incapacity,” “dishonesty” and a lack of “accountability,” the spoils system should be replaced, he argued, by a system that recognized “honesty, capacity and fidelity” as “the only real qualifications for office.” But the policy turn is a call to “return to the principles and practice of the founders of the Government” on this issue. Not unlike Lincoln’s Cooper Union address with its effort to build on the intentions of the Founding Fathers, Hayes’s letter argued that legislation was now needed to create an honorable system that, under the Founders, had been maintained through “established custom.” With this call for restoration, for a return to how “they meant” the public servant system to work, we catch a first glance of one of Hayes’s central themes that also emerges in his argument for unity. 9. Hoogenboom, Rutherford B. Hayes, 295. 10. Russell Conwell, Life and Public Services of Gov. Rutherford B. Hayes (Boston: B. B. Russell, 1876), 306. This text is Hayes’s campaign biography and contains many complete and excerpted speech texts from Hayes’s political career in Ohio. 11. August 5, 1867, address in Lebanon, Ohio, in Conwell, Life and Public Services, 232. 12. Ibid., 237–42. 13. Diary and Letters of Rutherford B. Hayes, February 25, 1877, 421. 14. Conwell, Life and Public Services, 307. 15. Diary and Letters of Rutherford B. Hayes, February 25, 1877, 421. 16. James Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents 1789–1897, VII (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1898): 442–43, emphasis added. 17. Ibid., 443. 18. Ibid. Other versions of the text, such as that available through Bartleby.com appear to have a critical error in this line and read “is generally not conceded” rather than “is generally now conceded.” The latter phrase is certainly correct since it is in keeping with Hayes’s optimistic perspective.

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19. Ibid., 443–44. 20. For the classic discussion of the characteristics of the inaugural genre see Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “Inaugurating the Presidency,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 15 (1985): 394–411. 21. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 446. 22. Hoogenboom, Rutherford B. Hayes, 346. 23. Gerald Gamm and Renee M. Smith, “Presidents, Parties, and the Public: Evolving Patterns of Interaction, 1877–1929,” In Speaking to the People: The Rhetorical Presidency in Perspective, ed. Richard J. Ellis (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 102. 24. Hayes’s turn to directly address African Americans in his audience with passages such as, “I believed that your rights and interests would be safer if this great mass of intelligent white men were let alone by the general Government,” (Atlanta, New York Times, September 23, 1877, 7) clearly indicate that Hayes himself was infected by many of the same racist assumptions of most European Americans at this time. For an incisive critique of presidential rhetoric on race issues during this period see Kirt H. Wilson, “The Politics of Place and Presidential Rhetoric in the United States, 1875–1901,” in Civil Rights Rhetoric and the American Presidency, ed. James Arnt Aune and Enrique D. Rigsby (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006), 16–40. 25. Cincinnati address, New York Times, September 16, 1877, 1; Louisville address, New York Times, September 18, 1877, 5; Knoxville Address, New York Times, September 22, 1877, 2; Atlanta address, New York Times, September 23, 1877, 7. 26. Cincinnati address, New York Times, September 16, 1877, 1; Atlanta address, New York Times, September 23, 1877, 7; Louisville address, New York Times, September 18, 1877, 5. 27. Lynchburg address, New York Times, September 25, 1877, 2; Atlanta address New York Times, September 23, 1877, 7. 28. Nashville address, New York Times, September 20, 1877, 4; Atlanta address, New York Times, September 23, 1877, 7; Nashville address, New York Times, September 20, 4. 29. Nashville address, New York Times, September 20, 1877, 4; Atlanta address, New York Times, September 23, 1877, 7. 30. New York Times, September 21, 1877, 1. 31. New York Times, September 22, 1877, 2. 32. Nashville address, New York Times, September 20, 1877, 4; Knoxville address, New York Times, September 22, 1877, 2. 33. Louisville address, New York Times, September 18, 1877, 5; Atlanta address, New York Times, September 23, 1877, 7; Knoxville address, New York Times, September 22, 1877, 2; Atlanta address, New York Times, September 23, 1877, 7. 34. New York Times, September 21, 1877, 2. 35. New York Times, September 26, 1877, 2. 36. Diary and Letters of Rutherford B. Hayes, September 25, 1877, 443. This entry also contains the following notation about a letter Hayes received from William Henry Smith confirming Hayes’s own impression of his success: “The trip South has been the greatest success, as it has been the most pleasant surprise, of the year. I must congratulate you on your speeches which have been admirable in their directness, and unexceptionable in taste. The temptation to touch on other topics must have been great, but you resisted it with the same wise self‑control that has always characterized your public career. The implacables are at last dumbfounded. They never believed that you would talk plainly to the Southern people of the Constitutional amendments and education as you did. Let them pass. They are now powerless for evil.” 37. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 459–60.

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38. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 493, 494. 39. It is important to note that Hayes’s other rhetorically significant acts included lengthy defenses of several presidential vetoes that were grounded not only on issues of protecting the powers of the executive office, but also on an effort to put some teeth into federal oversight of election procedures. He did not only talk about the need to protect the rights of African Americans, but took some, albeit meager, steps to actually protect those rights. By the end of his presidency he seemed to be convinced that universal education was the real solution to America’s racial problems. He worked on this issue through the Slater Fund, an organization that supported African American education. 40. Judis, “Making Hayes,”10.

The Problem with Public Memory: Benjamin Harrison Confronts the “Southern Question” kirt h. wilson

In late December, 1888, president-elect Benjamin Harrison sat poring through a mound of correspondence. Few would have guessed a year before that this five foot, six inch, Presbyterian deacon from Indiana, a man who insisted on keeping his then-unfashionable beard, would lead the United States into the last decade of the nineteenth century. The election had been close and controversial. President Cleveland secured 90,000 more popular votes than his rival, but Harrison won the Electoral College, 233 to 168.1 Now that the election was over, it seemed that everyone wished to congratulate Harrison, request a federal appointment, or offer advice on the pressing issues of the day. There was no shortage of concerns for the president-elect. Over the course of his tenure, Harrison advanced civil service reform, oversaw a massive buildup of the Navy, and signed the McKinley Tariff Act, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, and the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. Eight countries in Europe and South America signed new trade treaties with the United States. Yet despite these accomplishments, the historical accounts of Harrison’s administration are usually negative, and his legacy is ignored. Critiques of Harrison’s tenure often focus on the president’s personality. Harrison’s logical mind, personal discipline, and integrity had served him well as a lawyer in Indianapolis, but in Washington, D.C., these qualities

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alienated his Republican colleagues. After his election, he refused to reward party leaders with appointments to his cabinet. Other than his secretary of state, James Blaine, his cabinet contained only men with ties to the Midwest and who shared the president’s Presbyterian faith and military history. Harrison followed his own counsel for federal appointments, as well. New England’s party bosses secured the president’s victory, and they expected to be rewarded for their service. Men like Matthew Quay of Pennsylvania and Thomas Platt of New York were initially shocked and then angered when the new president ignored their recommendations. Harrison explained his decisions by insisting that candidates be judged on their merits, and he refused to use the patronage system to ameliorate tensions within his party.2 He alienated the Speaker of the House, Thomas B. Reed, by granting appointments to the only two individuals that the speaker considered personal and professional enemies.3 Republican Party bosses never forgave Harrison, and in 1892 they formed a grievance committee to prevent his reelection. They failed to stop his nomination, but the party infighting helped Grover Cleveland obtain a second term.4 Visitors to the White House complained that the president was cold and brusque. He rarely offered them a chair but expected visitors to stand and state their business as quickly as possible. According to one senator, talking with the president was like talking to a hitching post.5 Comments such as this contribute to the belief that Harrison’s administration was ineffective. James Fickle reflects the thoughts of most historians when he states, “Benjamin Harrison was a prime example of the fact that high marks for integrity, courage, and intellect do not necessarily make a good president. Harrison’s inability or unwillingness to function within the glad-handing, give-and-take world of practical politics made it virtually impossible for him to influence legislators or other political constituents and power brokers, and achieve his goals.”6 It is true that Harrison disliked the party politics of his day, but a closer inspection of his presidency reveals a more complicated story than Fickle avers.7 President Harrison worked extremely hard to overcome his unease with Washington politics; for example, he took an active role in shaping the McKinley Tariff. In private meetings, he negotiated a truce between the free-silver legislators of the western states and the high tariff forces of the Northeast. He entertained William McKinley at the White House, evidently persuading the future president to change the bill so that Harrison could use higher tariffs as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations.8 Congress eventually granted Harrison the unprecedented authority to modify tariff duties

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without congressional oversight. The president’s persuasive efforts were not limited to closed-door meetings, either. He gave approximately ninety-four speeches during the 1888 election, as Harrison and his aids pursued a fascinating campaign strategy. They encouraged delegations to visit Indianapolis, and then, just prior to a delegation’s arrival, Harrison’s aids would discover the group’s background and political interests. Harrison would greet his audience on the front porch of his house to offer some “extemporaneous” remarks that his stenographers recorded and, after editing, he would release to the press. Through this creative strategy, the candidate and his staff manipulated the national news media so that his ideas went before the U.S. public almost daily.9 After the election, Harrison used the presidency as a bully pulpit. He spoke publicly 296 times; according to Charles Calhoun, that number equals about one half of the speeches given by all of his predecessors combined. In 1891, Harrison went on the longest speaking tour of any president to date, traveling throughout the South and West. One of his contemporaries grudgingly admitted: “[the president] possessed, ‘a very cold, distant temperament,’ but that ‘if he should address ten thousand men from a public platform, he would make every one his friend.’”10 Even Fickle admits that despite his cold image, “[the president] was a very convincing speaker when addressing large crowds. He spoke in a forceful manner and exuded dignity, presence, and ability. His speeches were characterized by clarity, common sense, and excellent organization. Eschewing rhetorical bombast, Harrison illustrated his addresses with appropriate similes and never talked down to his audiences. Even political skeptics were impressed by the effectiveness of Harrison’s public style.”11 Unfortunately for Harrison, he never seemed to benefit politically from his skills as an orator. This essay offers a needed reassessment of President Benjamin Harrison. Although, as Lewis Gould argues, “a fresh look at Harrison cannot turn him into a dynamic president or the architect of a productive term, he does deserve a reappraisal as a chief executive who anticipated many of the techniques and changes of the twentieth-century White House.”12 Specifically, I contend that Harrison used his annual messages to Congress and the epideictic, secular-religious, speeches of public ceremony to influence the country’s moral conscience where it pertained to the “Southern Question.” In short, Harrison’s political agenda, personal strengths, and professional responsibilities converged, and he anticipated the rhetorical presidency by using multiple forums to advance the civil rights of African Americans. Unfortunately, the moral obligation between white and black citizens advanced

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by Harrison’s rhetoric conflicted with the increasingly romanticized public memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Harrison tried to negotiate this dilemma by justifying black rights within the logics of law, capitalism, and republican government; nevertheless, he failed to locate a sufficient rationale for his position and his failure resulted, in part, from the president’s complicity in the rhetoric of reconciliation. Harrison’s unwillingness to challenge the increasingly sanitized interpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction undermined his innovative attempt to use rhetoric as a force for social and political change.

harrison, civil rights, and public memory The words “The Southern Question” appear in light pencil at the top of many letters in Harrison’s papers immediately after his election. Indeed, only one issue seemed to be on the minds of his southern correspondents: lay aside sectional differences and the rhetoric of regional partisanship. Joseph Book wrote that the Republican Party could attract white southerners if Harrison would enact a policy “consistent with a constitutional government, that will soon allay all sectional strife, and give the nation and [sic] impetus for good, hitherto unknown.”13 One citizen from Baltimore urged the president not to reappoint the federal officers that had served under previous Republican administrations. New blood is needed, he wrote, to convince the well-intentioned Democrats of the South that the Republican Party of 1888 was not the Republican Party of 1868.14 Many of the South’s white citizens were concerned that the reelection of a Republican president might mean a return to the policies of Reconstruction. For the first time since 1875, the Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. A majority of the Supreme Court justices had been appointed by Republican administrations, and the Republicans were in firm control of the urban areas of the Northeast and Midwest.15 The new president was also a cause of concern for southern Democrats, because his stance on racial matters was progressive for the time. He was proud of his military service in the Civil War, and before he became president he was unashamed to wave the bloody shirt. He declared, “Some man says you are actuated by unfriendly feelings toward the South, you want to fight the war over again, you are flaunting the bloody shirt. My countrymen, those epithets and that talk never have any terrors for me.”16 When the Supreme

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Court held in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) that Congress did not have the authority to desegregate public accommodations, Senator Harrison promised that the Republicans would amend the Constitution to secure black civil rights.17 Prior to the 1888 election, Harrison argued that the South had not understood the lessons of the Civil War. He said, “We ask nothing more of the South to-night than that they cease to use this recovered citizenship which they had forfeited by rebellion to oppress and disfranchise those who equally with themselves under the Constitution are entitled to vote—that and nothing more. I do not need to enter into details. The truth to-day is that the colored Republican vote of the South . . . is deprived of all effective influence in the administration of this Government. . . . Have we not the spirit to insist that everywhere north and south in this country of ours no man shall be deprived of his ballot by reason of his politics?”18 Harrison told his audience at the Marquette Club in Chicago that the Republican Party must dedicate itself to two issues. The first was to protect domestic manufacturing and industry. The second was to make sure that the “colored men of the South” are able to exercise their constitutional rights of citizenship.19 This rhetoric was unwelcome to many of America’s white citizens. In the post-Reconstruction era, the southern conservatives and the northern Republicans had reached an implicit compromise: Republicans would not interfere in southern politics, and the South would participate in the processes of industrialism.20 The economic imperatives that drove national politics from 1877 to 1896 were reinforced by shifts in public discourse. The animosities of the Civil War and the partisan rhetoric of the Reconstruction era became indecorous, while, simultaneously, a rhetoric that stressed reconciliation and the common heritage of Anglo-Saxon culture became increasingly popular. Waldo Braden recognized decades ago that the mythic narratives of the Old South and the Lost Cause were essential to the discursive construction of the New South. More recently, David Blight has argued that the epideictic practices of the North and the South created a collective public memory that unified whites and excluded blacks.21 According to Blight, European Americans of the post-Reconstruction era were engaged in a purposeful act of amnesia. That is, individual soldiers as well as the white community, generally, reformulated the cause, prosecution, and the ends of the Civil War to accommodate the twin goals of national reconciliation and white supremacy. The first important reformulations of the Civil War narrative transpired in private or quasi-private spaces such as the home or the veteran’s hall. Soldiers from either side would meet

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with their compatriots to discuss their military experiences. During the late 1870s and 1880s, these local events were transformed into public rituals of commemoration and remembrance. Simultaneously, participants in the Civil War began to publish their recollections in magazines and newspapers. Union and Confederate generals explained to the public the military tactics they had used and the reasons for their wartime strategies. Fictionalized accounts of the war became extremely popular in the North and the South, and the Confederate soldier was a popular protagonist.22 Blight writes that the “Soldiers’ nostalgia for the war came increasingly to be wrapped in patriotic visions of what they had accomplished for the larger society. Such visions, in time, crystallized as abiding myths.”23 Union soldiers characterized their agency in apocalyptic terms. They were the “Saviors of the Nation,” the “Deliverers of the Country.” Confederates characterized their motives as the defense of liberty, the sanctity of the southern home, and the moral righteousness of a unique way of life. By 1889, an industry existed to support the thriving production of Civil War memorabilia; consequently, the fine line between remembrance and the market place was erased. For example, the year of Benjamin Harrison’s inaugural was also the year that the Duke Tobacco Company of Durham, North Carolina, produced a twenty-nine page multicolored souvenir book. For a price, individuals could own elaborately reproduced images of their favorite Confederate and Union war heroes, juxtaposed among advertisements for Duke cigarettes.24 Perhaps the defining moment of national reconciliation took place in July 1887 when veterans of the Battle of Gettysburg returned to the site to commemorate the event’s twenty-fourth anniversary. For the first time, members of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) and the Confederate Army participated in a joint ceremony to remember that fateful battle. Carol Reardon writes that in a grand ceremony, Union and Confederate soldiers formed lines and literally walked in the footsteps that they had followed during Picket’s Charge. Afterward, memorials to the 69th and 71st Pennsylvania Regiments were dedicated, and generals representing both sides declared that history would record the bravery and sacrifice of Confederate and Union soldiers alike. National papers described the event as a watershed moment; the Philadelphia Inquirer led with the headline, “NOW AND FOREVER! Reunited on the Battleground of Gettysburg.”25 The collective memories that were layered over the events of the Civil War came at a high price. African Americans were conspicuously absent from the rituals and narratives that celebrated the Civil War. For a brief period in

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the 1870s, black soldiers did participate in northern celebrations and on occasion they created their own; however, when Union and Confederate soldiers joined to celebrate the nonpartisan ideals of bravery, duty, and sacrifice, black soldiers were ignored. Often their exclusion was intentional.26 Gone, too, was the political force of the Emancipation Proclamation. In the decade that followed 1863, whites had acknowledged what Abraham Lincoln had declared in his second inaugural: The Civil War was a moral conflict and slavery was somehow the cause. Congressional Republicans from 1866 to 1875 used this version of history to justify their domestic agenda. The 1866 Civil Rights Act, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the 1870 and 1871 Enforcement Acts, and the 1875 Civil Rights Act were all viewed as necessary provisions to end slavery and the badges of servitude. After the collapse of Reconstruction, Republicans distanced themselves from the radical politics of the past, and the rights of black citizens largely disappeared as an important consideration for domestic policy. Thus, when Harrison became the president of the United States, white citizens had developed amnesia about the horrors of slavery and the social upheaval that it had caused; consequently, the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War were stripped of their political efficacy as supports of black equality. They remained as mythic dimensions of America’s memory and collective identity, but they no longer functioned as justifications for political judgment. The public memory of the Civil War in 1889 placed the president-elect in a difficult position. On the one hand, Harrison’s personal and professional identities were well suited to take advantage of the shifts in America’s culture. Harrison had been a brigadier general in the Union Army. He was a skilled orator who could recount the details of his military campaigns with ease. On June 26, 1888, he spoke to a large delegation of Indiana veterans and recalled the “gallantry, devotion, steadfastness,” and “high set patriotism” of his comrades as they had left to fight the Civil War. During the conflict, they had endured sickness, death, and disease. But, he declared, all of our sacrifices became worthwhile when we returned to “those homes that we loved, made again secure against all the perils which had threatened them.”27 Harrison’s military history was not the only advantage he possessed. Although he believed that the Constitution granted the federal government, and especially the executive branch only limited powers, he distinguished between the executive authority of the president and the symbolic demands of citizenship and public office. Speaking to Republicans about the problems of voter intimidation in the South, he said, “But some one will suggest: ‘Is

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there a remedy for this?’ I do not know, my fellow-citizens, how far there is a legal remedy under our own Constitution, but it does not seem to me to be an adequate answer. . . . Even if we should be compelled to answer: ‘We can do nothing but protest,’ is it not worth while here, and in relation to this American question, that we should at least lift up our protest; that we should at least denounce the wrong; that we should at least deprive the perpetrators of it of what we used to call the usufructs of the crime?”28 For Harrison, protest and moral outrage were appropriate responses to civil immorality, and they were necessary duties even for government officials. Although Harrison was situated to take political advantage of the country’s Civil War memory, the actual structure of that memory made advocacy for black civil rights difficult. Memory of the Civil War now excluded African Americans; consequently, any association of civil rights with slavery called into question the carefully sanitized memory of the war. In addition, such an association invoked a second memory—that of the Reconstruction era. The grand narrative of the Civil War gained much of its authority from the fact that it was the inversion of Reconstruction politics. Whereas the public now accepted the Civil War as a shining moment of valor and self-sacrifice, that same public was beginning to define the Reconstruction period as a time of greed, ignorance, and corruption. An increasing proportion of the nation believed the narratives about selfish carpet-baggers and ignorant black politicians. How could Harrison justify new civil rights policy without violating the positive memory of the Civil War or invoking the negative memory of Reconstruction? This is the question that Harrison tried to negotiate after he took office.29

benjamin harrison confronts the southern question Harrison’s first annual message to Congress, December 3, 1889, expressed the president’s stance on multiple legislative issues: he called for a higher tariff and the use of silver to back the currency; he lamented the sad history of federal policy toward American Indians, but he also called for tighter restrictions on Chinese immigrants in the West. Harrison also gave his support to two civil rights initiatives, the first involving public education. He stated, “No one will deny that it is of the gravest national concern that those who hold the ultimate control of all public affairs should have the necessary intelligence wisely to direct and determine them.”30 The federal treasury, he argued, should fund local schools directly.

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Harrison’s comments were in support of the Blair Education Bill. In December of 1881, Henry W. Blair of New Hampshire introduced a bill to end illiteracy in the South. In its various incarnations, it committed between seven and fifteen million dollars to public schools. When it appeared on the legislative calendar in 1884, then-Senator Harrison insisted that the bill incorporate restrictions that prevented racial discrimination in the bill’s implementation. Between 1881 and 1889, the measure passed the Senate three times, but it always failed in the House.31 Harrison threw his full weight behind the measure in his first annual message to Congress. He declared: The colored people did not intrude themselves upon us; they were brought here in chains and held in the communities where they are now chiefly found, by a cruel slave code. Happily for both races they are now free. They have, from a stand-point of ignorance and poverty, which was our shame, not theirs, made remarkable advances in education and in the acquisition of property. They have, as a people, shown themselves to be friendly and faithful towards the white race, under temptations of tremendous strength. They have their representatives in the national cemeteries where a grateful Government has gathered the ashes of those who died in its defense. They have furnished to our regular Army regiments that have won high praise from their commanding officers for courage and soldierly qualities, and for fidelity to the enlistment oath.32

Given the respective behavior of each race, the president affirms that African Americans deserve the educational funding that will enhance their already remarkable progress. Much of the above passage repeats the strong rhetoric that Harrison had used before the election. Its most important rhetorical feature is how it establishes a moral obligation between the country and its black population. The historical wrongs of forced displacement and the multiple forms of oppression inherent in the slavery system create a sense of duty, of responsibility. Illiteracy, for example, is not the fault of African Americans, and the president reasons that the white community must accept the blame for its past action, the consequences of that action and the cost of its future solution. The message is remarkable, as well, because it portrays African Americans as active agents. Except for the second independent clause—“they were brought here in chains and held in the communities where they are now chiefly found”— the text employs active rather than passive verbs to construct people of color as participants in the struggle for their own freedom and liberty. Furthermore, the second full sentence of the cited passage establishes a moment of social transformation, “Happily for both races they are now free.” In sentences four through six, Harrison specified several examples of how blacks have

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used their freedom. Religious terms are employed to describe the “faithfulness” that people of color demonstrated despite “temptations of tremendous strength.” He affirmed black achievements in education and wealth, and, finally, the president incorporated black soldiers into the Civil War narrative. African Americans, according to the passage, occupy plots in the national cemeteries just as whites do, and while few monuments may commemorate their military sacrifices, Harrison reminded Congress that the buried bodies of these soldiers provided their own testament. Although there is a striking similarity between Harrison’s pre- and postpresidential rhetoric, there are also significant differences that signal a shift in his discourse. When in the first annual message he discussed past forms of oppression, the president fixed the blame specifically on the system of slavery and the national white community, but when he discussed present acts of racial oppression, he avoided direct condemnation of regional institutions or specific communities. He wrote, “In many parts of our country where the colored population is large the people of that race are, by various devices, deprived of any effective exercise of their political rights and of many of their civil rights.” There is little doubt that this sentence refers to the South, but it is important that Harrison did not identify the region by name. Throughout his political career, he had blamed the South and its institutions directly; however, after his election he refrained from naming those responsible for contemporary acts of racism. Again, in his first annual message he declared: “If it is said that these communities must work out this problem for themselves, we have a right to ask whether they are at work upon it. Do they suggest any solution? When and under what conditions is the black man to have a free ballot? When is he in fact to have those full civil rights which have so long been his in law? When is that equality of influence which our form of government was intended to secure to the electors to be restored? This generation should courageously face these grave questions, and not leave them as a heritage for woe to the next. . . . The colored man should be protected in all of his relations to the Federal Government, whether as litigant, juror, or witness in our courts, as an elector for members of Congress, or as a peaceful traveler upon our interstate railways.”33 One could argue that Harrison need not name the South, because, through the magic of enthymematic reasoning, his audience supplied the missing elements; they knew to whom he referred. While this is probably an accurate interpretation, I believe that Harrison’s use of terms like “these communities” and the ambiguous “they” reflects a change in his approach to black civil rights.

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After his election, President Harrison chose to rearticulate his longstanding support for black rights through a new set of logics, that is, new warrants, claims, and data. In his inaugural address he declared, “I have altogether rejected the suggestion of a special executive policy for any section of our country. It is the duty of the Executive to administer and enforce, in the methods and by the instrumentalities pointed out and provided by the Constitution, all the laws enacted by Congress. These laws are general, and their administration should be uniform and equal.”34 One might read this passage as a capitulation to white southern interests. Prior to his inaugural, the president-elect received much advice on the Southern Question and most of it encouraged him to work with, not against, southern Democrats. I propose that this passage reflects Harrison’s political philosophy, a philosophy that distinguished between the duties of a president and the responsibilities of a senator or party official. When Harrison became the chief executive of the United States, the Constitution constrained his behavior. He said, “as a citizen may not elect what laws he will obey, neither may the Executive elect which he will enforce.”35 Harrison’s election did not require that he abandon his civil rights agenda, but it did demand that he forward his policy with new arguments; he had to advance his point in terms of the public good, because Harrison was now responsible to attend to the needs of the whole nation without partisanship. In his first annual message, President Harrison tried to abstract the problems of racism from their particular geographic and political contexts to place them within the larger ethical context of national virtue. Put differently, he made the issues of racial violence, electoral fraud, and black illiteracy national rather than regional problems. He almost stated this point explicitly when he argued that the wrong suffered by African Americans, “does not expend itself upon those whose votes are suppressed. Every constituency in the Union is wrong[ed].” 36 Thus, Harrison’s first annual message began by establishing a moral obligation between whites and blacks based solely on the history of slavery and the Civil War, but by the time he concluded this portion of his message, he had created a new obligation justified not by historical particulars but by the transcendent ideals of every citizen’s rights to justice, suffrage, and interstate travel. President Harrison’s new civil rights strategy involved three interrelated logics, that of law and order, capitalism, and republicanism. In his inaugural address he said, “A community where law is the rule of conduct, and where courts, not mobs, execute its penalties, is the only attractive field for business investments and honest labor.”37 Likely, this sentence reflects Harrison’s opposition to southern lynching practices; however, the president did not

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identify mob violence as a specifically black problem, but he choose, instead, to frame the issue in terms of law and economic prosperity.38 He appealed to his audience to avoid lawlessness for the commercial benefit of themselves and the country. According to the text, an inverse correlation exists between racism and industrial growth; where mob violence is sanctioned, business interests suffer, but in communities that reject lawlessness, capital is protected and development is secure. Harrison asked, “Shall the prejudices and paralysis of slavery continue to hang upon the skirts of progress? How long will those who rejoice that slavery no longer exists cherish or tolerate the incapacities it puts upon their communities? . . . Is it not quite possible that the farmers and promoters of the great mining and manufacturing enterprises which have recently been established in the South may yet find that the free ballot for the workingman, without distinction of race, is needed for their defense as well as for his own?”39 To supplement the discursive association between law and capitalism, Harrison created a second ratio between law and republican government to advance election reform. In December 1889, Henry Cabot Lodge drafted a measure that gave federal circuit court judges supervision of congressional elections. Since most of these judges were Republican, Congress assumed that Lodge’s measure would be used to protect black voters. Southern Democrats accused the Republicans of returning to the sectionalism of Reconstruction, and they renamed the Federal Elections Bill the “Force Bill.”40 Throughout his administration, Harrison vocally advocated for the Federal Elections Bill. In his second annual message Harrison wrote: “It is not, therefore, a question of whether we shall have a Federal election law, for we now have one, and have had for nearly twenty years, but whether we shall have an effective law. The present law stops just short of effectiveness. . . . This defect should be cured. Equality of representation and the parity of the electors must be maintained, or everything that is valuable in our system of government is lost. The qualifications of an elector must be sought in the law, not in the opinions, prejudices, or fears of any class, however powerful. . . . Surely there is nothing sectional about this creed, and, if it shall happen that the penalties of laws intended to enforce rights fall here and not there, it is not because the law is sectional, but because, happily, crime is local and not universal.”41 Two issues from this passage deserve comment. First, the text denies the congressional Democrats’ contention that the Federal Elections Bill was a sectional measure, a return to the policies of Reconstruction. Harrison countered that the bill was a national measure that applied to every citizen and every region equally. Indeed, the absence of the words “Negro” or “people

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of color” in this text is strategic. Without any specific reference to African Americans, Harrison enacted his commitment to policies that furthered the public good not individual or class interest. Second, Harrison associated the Federal Elections Bill, a specific incarnation of law, with America’s republican “system of government.” For the president, a good federal election law would do more than solve election fraud in particular communities, it also would sustain an essential principle of republicanism. In 1891, Harrison warned Congress that “the overthrow of majority control by the suppression or perversion of the popular suffrage” was perhaps the chief danger facing the country.42 The national government had to protect every citizen, and of course Harrison meant every male citizen, in his right to exercise the elective franchise. If it failed in its legal duty, the federal government would undermine its own authority by destroying the very principles on which it was founded. Harrison’s justification of black rights through the logics of law, capitalism, and republicanism represent an attempt to circumvent the traditional constraints of his office and the potential allegation that his agenda was sectional and partisan. It is significant that with the exception of his first congressional message, the president’s political messages avoided the issues of slavery, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction era, because that past, when discussed in political contexts, implied the abuse of executive power. Remarkably, Harrison never abandoned his concern for people of color. For example, by the second year of his administration it seemed doubtful that either the Blair Education Bill or the Federal Elections Bill would reach his desk; nevertheless, Harrison continued to advocate for new laws to protect African Americans. In the last year of his presidency he used his annual message to persuade Congress and the nation to condemn lynching. Harrison wrote: “The frequent lynching of colored people accused of crime is without the excuse which has sometimes been urged by mobs for a failure to pursue the appointed methods for the punishment of crime, that the accused have an undue influence over courts and juries. Such acts are a reproach to the community where they occur, and so far as they can be made the subject of Federal jurisdiction the strongest repressive legislation is demanded. A public sentiment that will sustain the officers of the law in resisting mobs and in protecting accused persons in their custody should be promoted by every possible means. . . . No lesson needs to be so urgently impressed upon our people as this, that no worthy end or cause can be promoted by lawlessness.” 43 (italics added) Given the public nature of this message, Harrison’s comments are directed to two audiences. It is an appeal to “public sentiment” as well as an

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argument to Congress to direct that sentiment and enact “repressive legislation.” Furthermore, the passage frames the racism of black lynching within the same label of lawlessness that, according to other Harrison texts, undermined industrial development and republican ideals. Note that this passage contains no reference to slavery or the historic problem of racial violence even though one could argue that 1880s and 1890s lynching was part of a longstanding practice of racial subjugation. Throughout the Reconstruction period, Republicans frequently used slavery’s legacy to condemn racial violence, and they declared that the Civil War was fought to end the institution and its “badges.” The president’s political rhetoric avoided that past, but it is interesting to note that his epideictic rhetoric, his ceremonial addresses, engaged it.

the conflicting duties of presidential priesthood and political advocacy According to Charles Calhoun, historians have failed to recognize Benjamin Harrison’s contribution to the presidency. Calhoun incorporates Robert Bellah’s notion of civil religion to argue that “Harrison brought to the presidency a deeply felt commitment to exercising the ‘priestly functions’ of the office.”44 Calhoun concludes that Harrison’s use of the presidency’s “priestly functions” helped to transform that office from the administrative models of the nineteenth century to the twentieth-century model of the rhetorical president. Without embracing all of the implications of civil religion theory, Calhoun’s interpretation does provide an opportunity to explore Harrison’s ceremonial rhetoric and posit a connection between his political advocacy for black civil rights and his frequent public speeches. One of the priestly functions of a president is to officiate over rituals that memorialize the past and establish the country’s present identity. Harrison seemed to derive his greatest pleasure from these responsibilities. On August 22, 1889, he spoke at a memorial event in Indiana to inaugurate a Civil War monument. He helped dedicate a memorial for President James Garfield in Ohio on May 30, 1890. In Boston, in that same year, he sat for five and a half hours reviewing the Massachusetts veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic. In 1891 Harrison toured the South and the West and, sometimes more than twice a day, he addressed assembled crowds, praising the local populace and the region. For example, he spoke in Chattanooga, Tennessee, after visiting Lookout Mountain. On April 15, 1891, he reviewed the

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battlegrounds around Atlanta, Georgia, and he offered several short speeches to enthralled audiences. In August of the same year, Harrison traveled north on a speaking tour of New England. He dedicated a battle monument in Bennington, Vermont, and spoke at the graveside of General George G. Meade, “the hero of Gettysburg,” in Philadelphia.45 In short, Harrison took the priestly duties of his office more seriously than his predecessors. Perhaps to escape Washington, D.C., and the party politics that he detested, Harrison toured much of the country giving epideictic speeches that reinforced American exceptionalism and the transcendent virtues of republican government. A close examination of Harrison’s ceremonial rhetoric suggests that the president may have viewed his quasi-religious duties as an opportunity to influence public attitudes toward civil rights. The speeches of his southern tour in 1891 contain the logics of law, capitalism, and republicanism that characterized his political advocacy in Washington, D.C., For example, in Tennessee Harrison declared that “everything in this country is to be brought to the measure of the law. I propose no other rule, either as an individual or as a public officer. I cannot in any degree let down this rule [Cries of ‘No!’ and cheers.] without violating my official duty. There must be no other supremacy than that of lawful majorities. We must all come at least to this conclusion—that the supremacy of the law is the one supremacy in this country of ours.”46 If one reads these sentences only within the textual boundaries of the speech then these comments are not particularly relevant to black civil rights. However, when read within a historical context that includes Tennessee’s history as the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan and, further, the rise of lynching in 1890 and 1891, the possible connection to black rights is more apparent. This connection grows stronger when one expands the context to include Harrison’s inaugural comments about law and order and his direct condemnation of southern lawlessness in the fourth annual message. Consider, too, his comments the previous day in Tallapoosa, Georgia: “We have a Government whose principles are very simple and very popular. The whole theory of our institutions is that, pursing those elections methods which we have prescribed under the Constitution, every man shall exercise freely the right that the suffrage law confides to him. . . . Let us press the debate in our campaigns as to what the law should be; but let us keep faith and submit with the reverence and respect which are due to the law once lawfully enacted.”47 The remarks about “suffrage law” and campaign debates likely refer to voter fraud and the pending Federal Elections Bill and, when combined

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with his comments in Tennessee, they suggest that these speeches are perhaps an early example of a president appealing directly to the people. Capitalism and industrial development were the most persistent themes in Harrison’s rhetoric when he toured the southern states. Significantly, he suggested that freedom and liberty were preconditions for the South’s economic transformation. In Atlanta he said, “[The Civil War] has opened up to diversified industries these States that were otherwise exclusively agricultural, and made it possible for you not only to raise cotton, but to spin and weave it, and has made Georgia such a State as it could not have been under the old conditions. I am sure we have many common purposes, and as God shall give us power to see truth and right, let us do our duty, and, while exacting all our own rights, let us bravely and generously give every other man his equal rights before the law.”48 (italics added) This passage identifies the origin of the South’s economic prosperity as the moment of slavery’s abolition, and it then establishes a common “duty,” a joint responsibility for the president and his white audience to “give every other man his equal rights before the law.” In Birmingham, Alabama, the president expanded on these ideas claiming that freedom, itself, was necessary for prosperity: “My countrymen, we thought the war a great calamity, and so it was. The destruction of life and of property was sad beyond expression; and yet we can see now that God led us through that Red Sea to a development in material prosperity and to a fraternity that was not otherwise possible. [Cheers.] The industries that have called to your midst so many toiling men are always and everywhere the concomitants of freedom. Out of all this freedom from the incubus of slavery the South has found a new industrial birth.”49 Harrison’s association of freedom and material prosperity was integral to the logic of capitalism that, in other texts, he had used to advance new civil rights legislation. Indeed, Harrison’s presidential rhetoric provided a fairly simple thesis: “Good social order, respect for the law, regard for other men’s rights, orderly, peaceful administration are the essential things to any community.”50 Harrison’s “priestly duties” allowed him to blur traditional distinctions between the epideictic and deliberative functions of rhetoric, but, simultaneously, the unique demands of public ceremony constrained his discursive innovations. The president’s speech in Galveston, Texas, was the longest of his tour, and while it did not address the Southern Question it did present the administration’s stance on a new treaty with Brazil, Harrison’s desire for a one-cent postage on domestic mail, and his agenda for increasing foreign trade. The speech concludes, “I have freely spoken my mind to you

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on these topics. I hope I have done so with no offence or impropriety. [Cries of ‘No, no!’ and cheers.] I would not on an occasion so full of general good feelings as this obtrude anything that should induce division or dissent.”51 In these brief sentiments, Harrison identified a constraint that future presidents would experience when they, too, tried to blend politics and public ritual: Presidents must advance their position without offending a bipartisan audience gathered to celebrate the occasion rather than debate an issue. With respect to his speeches in Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, the president avoided offense by reframing his support for black rights with the language of “equal rights” and public prosperity. Harrison protected himself further by actively participating in the public memory of the Civil War as a romantic conflict between gallant white soldiers, a war that brought economic prosperity and industrial development. Consider this passage from a speech he gave in Johnson City, Tennessee, on April 14, 1891: “What is it that has stirred the public of this great region, that has kindled these furnace fires, that has converted these retired and isolated farms upon which you and your ancestors dwelt into centers of trade and mechanical pursuits? . . . It is that we have no line of division between the States; it is that these impulses of freedom and enterprise, once limited in their operations, are now common in all the States. We have a common heritage. The Confederate soldier has a full, honorable, and ungrudged [sic] participation in all the benefits of a great and just Government.”52 (italics added) Harrison’s comments rearticulate the popular themes that one heard throughout this period, especially in the speeches of Henry Grady.53 Mirroring Grady’s point that the Confederate soldier had acted virtuously because he was unaware of the deeper purposes that only God knew, Harrison stated in Atlanta, “We can all say with the Confederate soldier who carried a gun for what seemed to him to be right, that God knew better than any of us what was best for the country and for the world.”54 Harrison’s epideictic speeches, especially in the South, reveal both the promise and problems of his rhetorical presidency. On the one hand, he was one of only a few vocal advocates for equal rights in the post-Reconstruction era and, during his presidency, he communicated the moral lesson that any abrogation of a citizen’s rights undermined the country’s foundational principles and its economic progress. He espoused this position through the traditional means of congressional messages, but he also expressed these arguments at ceremonial occasions meant primarily to praise the nation, create values, and sustain both community and identity. On the other hand, Harrison never found a language that was effective politically. His abstraction

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to the logics of law, capitalism, and republicanism were innovative, but they were logics that assumed equitable systems of institutional and discursive power. Put differently, Harrison’s rhetoric appealed to the nation’s conscience by redefining black civil rights as citizens’ rights, but it made few demands on contemporary institutions that sustained inequity despite the legal status of blacks as citizens. The president’s frequent argument that liberty promoted industrial progress could coexist with business practices that employed African Americans only in menial jobs and as scabs against union strikes. Compared to some of the Reconstruction era’s political discourse, which argued for a complete transformation of southern culture, Harrison’s rhetoric falls short. Furthermore, the president’s participation in the sanitized public memory of the Civil War separated Harrison from an older set of arguments that defined the South’s social and political transformation as a necessary consequence of the war’s terror and human sacrifice. Although the rhetorical choice to abandon Reconstruction’s arguments for the logics of law, capitalism, and republicanism are understandable given the political realities of the 1890s, one cannot conclude that a stronger, more effective, rhetoric was impossible. Indeed, one wonders whether Harrison’s considerable rhetorical skill and his experiences as a military commander did not provide exactly those resources necessary to challenge public memory and reintroduce the claim that European Americans had a moral and political obligation to advance black rights not just every citizen’s rights.

conclusion President Harrison is a fascinating example of an early rhetorical president. He firmly believed in the limits of his office, but he enacted a progressive strategy that used rhetoric to affirm public policy, shape the public’s conscience, and reinforce national identity. Furthermore, given the active racism of his day and the comparative silence of Presidents Arthur, Cleveland, and McKinley, Harrison’s support for black civil rights is remarkable. Unfortunately, his efforts were unsuccessful. The Federal Elections Bill passed the House, but it died in the Senate when Republicans were either unwilling or unable to overcome a Democratic filibuster. The Blair Bill also failed to exit the Senate in 1890 when, to Blair’s apparent surprise, two senators changed their minds and voted against the measure.55 Since the Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate, one might conclude that Harrison’s attempt at moral suasion did not convince even his own party.

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There are many reasons why President Harrison failed to secure greater protection for blacks during his administration. Perhaps the most compelling argument is to acknowledge that the institution of the presidency in 1889 was no match for the political strength of the states or the increasingly racist attitudes of white citizens. Still, I contend that Harrison’s complicity in the constitution of public memory undermined his ability to effect change. Harrison refigured black rights within the general logics of law, capitalism, and republicanism; however, that rhetoric was no match for the countervailing discourse of place. Elsewhere I have argued that the post-Reconstruction period involved a political culture marked by the politics and rhetoric of place. Through rhetoric, legislation, and coercion, southern conservatives reestablished the caste system of the antebellum era, and although African Americans resisted that process, the politics of place invaded almost every aspect of life in the United States. It affected the constitutional interpretations of the Supreme Court. It influenced the political judgments of Congress. It even defined specific limits on the authority of the president.56 From 1875 to 1901, U.S. presidents engaged in the culture of place to various degrees, but by the turn of the century, their participation had constrained the presidency’s authority to protect black rights. While Harrison was the only post-Reconstruction president who even tried to resist the era’s racism, he nonetheless participated in the politics of place by supporting a public memory that excluded African Americans. In the second year of Harrison’s administration, 1890, Mississippi rewrote its state constitution. The revised document stated that an election official could ask any citizen who wished to register to read and interpret the state constitution. This literacy test was intended to exclude black voters, but it did not name them specifically. Seven southern states would follow Mississippi’s example, and President Harrison was powerless to stop them. Not only did he lack the constitutional authority to interfere in state politics, but he also lacked the moral authority to condemn the action, because the language of Mississippi’s literacy test was consistent with Harrison’s public rhetoric. Mississippi law did not distinguish on the basis of race; therefore, Harrison had little grounds for objection. He had chosen to advance black civil rights with arguments that put the common good and universal law above the particular history of southern racism or the region’s specific practices of racial exclusion; therefore, he occupied a discursive space where equality and white supremacy could coexist. Mississippi’s constitution exploited that space as did the Jim Crow legislation that followed. When Harrison left office in 1893, the class system of the slavery era was making a significant come back

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under the guise of “separate but equal,” and the absence of African Americans in public memory was reflected in the growing absence of people of color from the political system.

notes 1. For an interesting account of the election and a persuasive counterargument to the common allegation that the Republicans stole the election see, James L. Baumgardner, “The 1888 Presidential Election: How Corrupt?” Presidential Studies Quarterly 14 (1984): 416– 27. 2. Homer Edward Socolofsky and Allan B. Spetter, The Presidency of Benjamin Harrison, American Presidency Series (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987), 78–80. 3. Louis W. Koenig, “Benjamin Harrison,” in The Presidents: A Reference History, ed. Henry F. Graff (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984), 354–55; Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, “Benjamin Harrison, 1889–1893: Nobody’s Grandson,” in The American President (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999), 174–83. For a more charitable interpretation of Harrison’s appointment decisions see, Socolofsky and Spetter, The Presidency of Benjamin Harrison, 31–41. 4. For a detailed account of Harrison’s conflict with Quay and the “Grievance Committee” see James A. Kehl, “The Unmaking of a President: 1889–92,” Pennsylvania History 39 (1972): 469–84. See also Socolofsky and Spetter, The Presidency of Benjamin Harrison, 195–98. 5. Koenig, “Benjamin Harrison,” 355. 6. James E. Fickle, “Benjamin Harrison,” in The American Presidents: The Office and the Men, ed. Frank N. Magill (Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 1986), 433. See also the assessment in H. Wayne Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley; National Party Politics, 1877–1896 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1969). 7. It is worth noting that the narrative of this paragraph reflects only one view, though admittedly the dominant view, of Harrison’s legacy. Charles Calhoun offers an alternative history, arguing that the disparagement of Harrison’s presidency was the work of twentiethcentury historians. According to Calhoun, Harrison’s contemporaries liked and respected the president despite his interpersonal failings. See Charles W. Calhoun, “Benjamin Harrison, Centennial President: A Review Essay,” Indiana Magazine of History 84 (1988): 135–60. 8. Harrison’s support for a higher tariff resulted partially from his support of domestic manufacturing and partially from a desire to negotiate favorable treaties with South and Central American countries. See Lewis L. Gould, “Benjamin Harrison, 1889–1893,” in The American Presidents, ed. Melvin I. Urofsky (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000), 249– 50; Socolofsky and Spetter, The Presidency of Benjamin Harrison, 50–51. 9. Socolofsky and Spetter, The Presidency of Benjamin Harrison, 11. 10. Quoted in Charles W. Calhoun, “Civil Religion and the Gilded Age Presidency: The Case of Benjamin Harrison,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 23 (1993): 653. 11. Fickle, “Benjamin Harrison,” 428. 12. Gould, “Benjamin Harrison, 1889–1893,” 247. 13. Joseph W. Booth to Benjamin Harrison, December 22, 1888, Presidential Papers Microfilm: Benjamin Harrison Papers, Library of Congress, Series 2, Reel 61. 14. S. Bunting to Benjamin Harrison, December 27, 1888, Presidential Papers Microfilm: Benjamin Harrison Papers, Library of Congress, Series 2, Reel 61.

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15. See Vincent P. De Santis, Republicans Face the Southern Question: The New Departure Years, 1877–1897 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1959), 190–94. Harrison would appoint four justices to the Supreme Court during his administration. See Socolofsky and Spetter, The Presidency of Benjamin Harrison, 187–91. 16. See Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883); Benjamin Harrison, “Michigan Club Banquet,” February 22, 1888, in Speeches of Benjamin Harrison, ed. Charles Hedges (New York: United States Book Company, 1892), 12. 17. George Sinkler, The Racial Attitudes of American Presidents, from Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971), 104–05. 18. Speeches of Benjamin Harrison, “Michigan Club Banquet,” 13. 19. Ibid., “Marquette Club,” March 20, 1888, 21. 20. De Santis, Republicans Face the Southern Question: The New Departure Years, 1877–1897, 19–65; William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), chapters 14–15; Philip A. Klinkner and Rogers M. Smith, The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), chapter 3. See also Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Stanley P. Hirshon, Farewell to the Bloody Shirt: Northern Republicans and the Southern Negro, 1877–1893 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966); Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley; National Party Politics, 1877–1896. 21. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2001); Waldo W. Braden, “Repining over an Irrevocable Past: The Ceremonial Orator in a Defeated Society, 1865–1900,” in Oratory in the New South, ed. Waldo W. Braden (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979); Waldo W. Braden and Harold Mixon, “Epideictic Speaking in the Post-Civil War South and the Southern Experience,” Southern Communication Journal 45 (1988): 40–57. For a recent popular press discussion about how Civil War memory has effected the United States’ national park system see Andrew Curry, “The Better Angels: Why We are Still Fighting Over Who was Right and Who Was Wrong in the Civil War,” U.S. News & World Report, September 30, 2002, 56–63. 22. Carol Reardon, Pickett’s Charge in History and Memory, Civil War America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 89. 23. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, 189–90. 24. Ibid., 201. 25. Quoted in Reardon, Pickett’s Charge in History and Memory, 103. For a detailed account of the event see all of chapter 4. 26. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, 145–49, 68–70. 27. See, for example, Speeches of Benjamin Harrison, “Speech to Indiana Regiment,” June 26, 1888, 28–29. 28. Ibid., “Marquette Club,” 21–22. 29. Although dated, Sinkler provides a nice summary of Harrison’s presidential advocacy for black civil rights. See George Sinkler, “Benjamin Harrison and the Matter of Race,” Indiana Magazine of History 65 (1969): 197–215. 30. Benjamin Harrison, “Message to Congress, December 3, 1889,” in Public Papers and Addresses of Benjamin Harrison, March 4, 1889–March 4, 1893 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1893), 61. 31. Hirshon, Farewell to the Bloody Shirt: Northern Republicans and the Southern Negro, 1877–1893; Sinkler, The Racial Attitudes of American Presidents, from Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt; Socolofsky and Spetter, The Presidency of Benjamin Harrison, 65–69.

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32. Public Papers and Addresses, “Message to Congress, December 3, 1889,” 62. 33. Ibid., 62–63. 34. Ibid., “Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1889, 29. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., “Message to Congress, 3 December 1889,” 62. 37. Ibid., “Inaugural Address,” 30. 38. Harrison addressed this issue explicitly in his 1892 address to Congress. 39. Public Papers and Addresses, “Inaugural Address,” 29. 40. Hirshon, Farewell to the Bloody Shirt, 200–35; Sinkler, “Benjamin Harrison and the Matter of Race”; Sinkler, The Racial Attitudes of American Presidents, 260–63; Socolofsky and Spetter, The Presidency of Benjamin Harrison, 60–64. 41. Public Papers and Addresses, “Message to Congress, December 1, 1890,” 89. 42. Ibid., “Message to Congress, December 9, 1891,” 124. 43. Ibid., “Message to Congress, December 6, 1892,” 156. 44. Calhoun, “Civil Religion and the Gilded Age Presidency,” 653. See also Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96 (1967): 1–21; James David Fairbanks, “The Priestly Functions of the Presidency: A Discussion of the Literature on Civil Religion and Its Implications for the Study of Presidential Leadership,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 11 (1981): 214–32. 45. Each of these events is represented by a speech that appears in Speeches of Benjamin Harrison. 46. Speeches of Benjamin Harrison, “Memphis, Tennessee,” April 17, 1891, 316. See also Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). 47. Speeches of Benjamin Harrison, “Tallapoosa, Georgia,” April 16, 1891, 307. 48. Ibid., “Atlanta, Georgia,” April 16, 1891, 305. 49. Ibid., “Birmingham, Alabama,” April 16, 1891, 312. 50. Ibid., “Houston, Texas,” April 18, 1891, 322. 51. Ibid., “Galveston, Texas,” April 18, 1891, 328. 52. Ibid., “Johnson City, Tennessee,” April 14, 1891, 294. 53. See Henry Grady, “The New South,” in American Voices: Significant Speeches in American History, 1640–1945, ed. James R. Andrews and David Zarefsky (New York: Longman, 1989), 352–59. 54. Speeches of Benjamin Harrison, “Atlanta, Georgia,” 305. 55. Socolofsky and Spetter, The Presidency of Benjamin Harrison, 62–70. 56. Kirt H. Wilson, The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate: The Politics of Equality and the Rhetoric of Place (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002); Kirt H. Wilson, “The Politics of Place and Presidential Rhetoric in the United States, 1875–1901,” in Civil Rights Rhetoric and the American Presidency, ed. James Arnt Aune and Enrique D. Rigsby (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006), 16–40.



Grover Cleveland and the Nonrhetorical Presidency michael leff

There are several good reasons why we might regard Grover Cleveland as a nonrhetorical figure in the history of the U.S. presidency. The first and perhaps most obvious of these has to do with his style. The prominent Buffalo lawyer, John G. Milburn, once commented that in pleading legal cases Cleveland was “forceful, deliberate, rather slow moving, impressive, genial; a very earnest advocate . . . without any of the arts of the rhetorician.”1 These same characteristics mark his presidential papers, which Allan Nevins has aptly described as verbose and ponderous. Consider, for example, this sentence that appears in Cleveland’s first inaugural address”: “A due regard for the interests and prosperity of all the people demands that our finances shall be established upon such a sound and sensible basis as shall secure the safety and confidence of business interests and make the wage of labor sure and steady, and that our system of revenue shall be so adjusted as to relieve the people of unnecessary taxation, having a due regard to the interests of capital invested and workingmen employed in American industries, and preventing the accumulation of a surplus in the Treasury to tempt extravagance and waste.”2 On rare occasion, Cleveland’s prose suggests a conscious attempt to turn a phrase or embellish a thought. Thus, in the second inaugural, we find an extended metaphor: “It behooves us to constantly watch for every symptom of insidious infirmity that threatens our national vigor. The strong man who

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is in the confidence of sturdy health courts the sternest activities of life and rejoices in the hardihood of constant labor may still have lurking near his vitals the unheeded disease that dooms him to sudden collapse. It can not be doubted that our stupendous achievements as a people and our country’s robust strength have given rise to heedlessness of those laws governing our national health which we can no more evade than human life can escape the laws of God and nature.”3 Yet, the image is so thoroughly conventional and amplified in such leaden style that, when, a little later in the address, Cleveland asserts that political judgments should be “unmoved by alluring phrases,” we are unlikely to charge him with a performative contradiction. Secondly, there is the matter of character. A rhetorical character is mobile, flexible, accommodative, and highly sensitive to the demands of audiences, times, and contexts. These are not terms that describe Cleveland. Allan Nevins, author of the most thorough assessment of the man and his character ever written, gives us this quite different assessment of his subject: “He left to subsequent generations an example of the courage that never yields an inch in the cause of truth, and that never surrenders an iota of principle to expediency.”4 Alyn Brodsky, writing almost seventy years after Nevins, offers a similar judgment: “Cleveland refused to do what was politically expedient;” he remained unwaveringly committed to moral principle even though “on more than one occasion, it meant placing his political career in jeopardy. The man was more than a political outsider. He was, in essence, a political freak.”5 While other historians demonstrate less enthusiasm for Cleveland, they generally use much the same language as Brodsky and Nevins in portraying his character. Thus, Vincent De Santis writes: “Cleveland, a strapping man of well over 200 pounds, came to the White House in 1885 with the reputation of a reformer and a man of courage, integrity, and prodigious work habits. Actually he was unimaginative, stolid, brutally forthright and candid, and he lacked a sense of timing.”6 Likewise, Morison, Commager, and Leuchtenburg maintain that: “For a person of such generous bulk, Grover Cleveland was remarkably austere, unbending, and ungenial. He was a man of integrity, courage, and steadfast devotion to duty; but singularly lacking in imagination and never at home in the rough and tumble of party politics.”7 Nor, in the view of these authors, did Cleveland improve with age, for they characterize him at the outset of his second term as “a little stouter and a little more set in his ways.”8 The four judgments I have just cited are typical, and whether they praise Cleveland’s moral rectitude or dismiss him as a martinet, they commonly regard

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him as a simple, uncomplicated character governed by principle and innocent of any political or rhetorical artifice. Richard Welch, however, presents a more nuanced, and to my mind, more realistic assessment of Cleveland. Reacting against the tendency to treat the man as “an Eagle Scout mouthing truisms about duty,” Welch observes that Cleveland’s personality and policies involved ambiguities and inconsistencies. There was “a measure of difference” between his “rhetoric and his actions,” and an even greater difference between the guileless persona he projected to the outside world and “the ambitious, irritable, sensitive person behind the public mask.”9 Cleveland’s policy decisions did not almost mesh perfectly with his principles. He sometimes equivocated and shaved “his convictions in behalf of political expediency.”10 Nevertheless, having registered these important qualifications, Welch proceeds to affirm much of the conventional tale about Cleveland. He was indeed an earnest, independent, and stubborn man, and while it served his political interests to present himself as someone who never deviated from principle, there was, Welch concludes, “little of sham in the self-portrait.” Judged in relation to the political standards of his day, Cleveland made a notable effort to “match his political actions with his sense of duty.”11 Thus, although he was not exactly a “political freak,” Cleveland’s character and policies set him near one margin of the range for acceptable political conduct. If we imagine a spectrum that runs from total candor and unbending commitment to principle, on one side, to complete cynicism and accommodation to expediency, on the other, Cleveland falls well toward the side of candor and principle. To the extent that this position excludes or deemphasizes a flexible response to time, place, and differing points of view, we can regard Cleveland as nonrhetorical or perhaps antirhetorical.12

cleveland and the rhetorical presidency There is yet another standard that we might use to categorize Cleveland as “nonrhetorical,” and this is the one that comes from Tulis’s The Rhetorical Presidency. Tulis divides the history of the presidency into two periods, an earlier pre- or nonrhetorical phase, and a later rhetorical phase, which begins with Theodore Roosevelt and achieves maturity during the tenure of Woodrow Wilson. Cleveland not only comes before the point of demarcation, but his discourse, Tulis maintains, nicely conforms to the earlier pattern. That is, Cleveland does not speak directly to the public about issues of the day but confines his “policy rhetoric to formal messages to Congress.”13

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It is possible to quarrel with Tulis’s classification by arguing that, in one guise or another, Cleveland was rhetorically active throughout his two terms in office. He made quite direct attempts to influence specific provisions of tariff legislation in both terms; his “Special Message to Congress” of March 1, 1886, was designed to and did in fact have an impact on public opinion about the tenure-of-office controversy; he used a variety of rhetorical tactics to help secure repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act.14 And while he declined an invitation to speak before a Chicago business group on the currency issue, he did use the opportunity to publish a lecture on that topic, and later in the same year (1895), he actively coordinated a “systematic campaign”15 to promote his position in the South. Nevertheless, such objections fail to engage Tulis’s main point. However active Cleveland may have been in trying to influence legislative action or public opinion, his approach was almost always indirect. He endorsed the view that the president’s role was that of an administrator, whose main obligation was “to carry out the policies formulated by the legislative branch.”16 He rarely discussed political questions in his speeches. His messages to Congress were thoroughly conventional in tone and form, and these were his primary vehicles for policy rhetoric. Thus, even if Cleveland was more engaged in rhetorical business than is ordinarily assumed, his was still not a “rhetorical presidency” in Tulis’s sense of the phrase, i.e., a presidency in which “popular or mass rhetoric” functions as “principal tool of governance” and in which presidents are assumed to have “a duty constantly to defend themselves publicly, to promote policy initiatives nationwide, and inspirit the population.”17 Yet, if these considerations help to vindicate Tulis’s judgment in the particular case, they also raise a question about how Tulis uses the term rhetoric. He seems to make a distinction of kind and degree at the same time. In one sense, the rhetorical presidency is marked by the degree of involvement with rhetoric. In the old system, rhetorical activity was only one part of the job, but it now has become “the heart of the presidency—its essential task.”18 Tulis, however, also implies a difference in the kind of rhetoric used in these two paradigms. The old system reflected the Founders’ fear of demagogic persuasion, and so it worked to constrain appeal to the passions through certain institutional arrangements. Argument was structured and limited by the checks and balances among the branches of government and by constitutional principles. This configuration, Tulis argues, was not intended to drain passion from the political arena altogether—the Founders were too worldly wise to believe that this was a realistic possibility. Nor did they prescribe in

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advance how to stabilize relationships among the branches of government, for they understood that there existed “no formula independent of political circumstance with which to weigh such competing institutional claims.”19 And so, on Tulis’s account, the old system did not strive to eliminate rhetoric with some dispassionate form of reasoning or with an algorithmic mode of resolving differences. Instead, it worked to encourage deliberation by restricting opportunities for populist rhetoric. This was not a rejection of rhetoric but an effort to promote and protect a certain kind of rhetoric. In general terms, this distinction between kinds of rhetoric has had a long history, and it might be useful to pause and consider some of its incarnations. Perhaps the most notable of these traces back to antiquity and the differing conceptions of rhetoric advanced, on one side, by Aristotle and on the other, by rhetorical humanists such as Isocrates and Cicero. Both conceptions of rhetoric acknowledge the importance of the passions, but for Aristotle they represent obstacles to deliberation that should be harnessed and controlled by reason, while for Isocrates and Cicero, they are resources that can and should be exploited in order to build political solidarity. The first approach seeks to divide matters and test differences through disciplined argumentative procedures; the second seeks to integrate matters and overcome difference through a union of sentiment and reason. In the eighteenth century, a similar distinction would have been recognized in the contrast between British and French versions of rhetorical practice. The British model was parliamentary debate, where Burke, Fox, and Chatham argued opposing views and resolved them through well-established institutional rules. The French model was the rhetoric of Danton and Robespierre, which sought to move the general will and effect a unity of sentiment within the audience. The difference between the two approaches is clear, but both are also clearly rhetorical. Consequently, Tulis’s “rhetorical presidency” does not distinguish between a nonrhetorical and a rhetorical phase in the history of the presidency so much as it marks a shift from one form of rhetoric to another— from a deliberative rhetoric to a populist rhetoric. Of course, we must also take into account the issue of degree—the transformation of rhetoric from one part of the president’s job to its status as the principal instrument of governance. But, insofar as it correctly describes changes in the presidency, this development is itself connected to the shift from a deliberative to a populist rhetoric. Under the deliberative model, rhetorical encounters are, or at least appear to be, restricted within a preestablished legal and institutional frame. While there is latitude for changing the rules through interpretation of the law, the relationship of the disputants and the principles of engagement

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normally work within limits fixed before the rhetorical encounter begins. The populist model is, or at least appears to be, less constrained by antecedent rules. The relationship of the disputants to one another and the range of acceptable strategies often emerge in and through the rhetorical exchange. In the populist context, rhetoric seems less an instrument to accomplish some extrarhetorical purpose than a constitutive force in and of itself. As I have tried to indicate by hedging some of my assertions, this difference is not absolute. Our understanding of existing laws and rules is always influenced by our immediate argumentative purposes, and so, since our rhetorical and hermeneutic faculties always work together within a deliberative frame, the frame itself cannot remain absolutely fixed over time. Likewise, populist rhetoric does not occur in a cultural vacuum. An intricate set of traditions, expectations, and beliefs constrain what an arguer can accomplish within a given situation. Populist persuasion may be self-generative in the sense that it can use any appeal that it can persuade an audience to accept, but in practice, the frame of acceptance is always limited, since the process must operate within the boundaries of a given social reality. These qualifications notwithstanding, however, the difference of tendency between the two types of rhetoric remains visible and important: Populist rhetoric operates against fewer and less obtrusive formal constraints; deliberative rhetoric is more inclined to appeal to authority grounded in antecedent rules and procedures. With these considerations in mind, let me now return to Grover Cleveland and the exercise I began in classifying his degree of rhetoricality. At least four conclusions seem to emerge: (1) It would be an error to dismiss Cleveland as antirhetorical or nonrhetorical because his tenure in office preceded the “rhetorical presidency” and because the general pattern of his communication falls within the structure of the deliberative model; (2) This conclusion is plausible because we know that the deliberative model, while it hedges the autonomy of rhetoric, still offers considerable scope for various kinds of rhetorical performance; (3) We might expect, however, that a president working within the deliberative paradigm would have some tendency to rely upon fixed rules and appeals to extrarhetorical authority; (4) We might also expect this tendency to be especially strong in a president such as Cleveland, whose style is rather wooden and whose personal and political proclivities incline toward rule-governed consistency rather than rhetorical accommodation to circumstances. In the remainder of this chapter, I propose to test these expectations by reference to a specific case—the Pullman strike of 1894, one of the most

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dramatic moments in Cleveland’s second term and one of the turning points in the rhetorical and ideological history of the Democratic Party. I will first offer an account of the event itself and then examine Cleveland’s response to the rhetorical problem caused when John P. Altgeld, the Democratic governor of Illinois, protested the policy Cleveland had adopted.

pullman During the winter of 1893–94, the Pullman Palace Car Company laid off about 2,000 of its 5,500 workers and cut the salaries of those still on the payroll by an average of 25 percent. In and of itself, this action was hardly shocking, since the country was in the throes of a depression, and unemployment and wage reductions had become common. In the case of Pullman, however, there was a special and ugly complication. Almost all of the workers lived in the city of Pullman, a company town located twelve miles south of downtown Chicago, and hence the workers were compelled to pay the company for their rent and utilities and to shop at the company store. Moreover, George Pullman firmly believed that the company and the town were independent entities, and so he refused to adjust the prices he charged workers to compensate for their diminished incomes.20 Squeezed at both ends, the Pullman workers faced an increasingly desperate situation, and by spring, they decided to take collective action. As a first step, they selected a committee of representatives to meet with Pullman and ask him to negotiate their grievances. The meeting was held on May 10, 1894, and the result was a disaster. Pullman not only declined to negotiate, but he also fired three members of the committee the next day. In response, 80 percent of the company’s workers went on strike. Many of them belonged to the American Railway Union (ARU), an organization founded only a year earlier by Eugene Debs, but which by the summer of 1894 enrolled more than 100,000 members and had established itself as a national presence on the labor scene. In June of 1894, the ARU held a convention in Chicago, and a number of Pullman workers made an appearance in order to petition for help. Debs and other ARU leaders were reluctant to make a commitment, since they believed that a major labor action was unlikely to succeed during a time of depression. Nevertheless, the membership had been moved deeply by the pleas of their Pullman brethren, and these sentiments could not be ignored. On June 22, the convention voted to approach George Pullman once again

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and ask him to negotiate. If he did not comply within four days, the ARU would initiate a boycott by refusing to operate any train that included a Pullman car. Pullman refused to make any concessions, and the boycott began on June 26. As this struggle materialized, the ARU had to confront the General Manager’s Association (GMA), which was a consortium of twenty-four railway companies headquartered in Chicago. Taken together, these companies had a capital stock of more than $800 million, a work force of just less than a quarter of a million, and for the year 1894, they realized a collective net profit of over $100 million. Not surprisingly, the GMA took a dim view of an industrial railroad union and was more than willing to make common cause with Pullman. The members unanimously agreed to resist the boycott, to insist that they had a contractual obligation to the Pullman Company, and to dismiss immediately any workers who refused to operate Pullman equipment. The collision between ARU and the GMA had a sensational and almost immediate impact. Within a few days, rail traffic was disrupted from Chicago to the West Coast and at some points had come to a complete halt. In the late nineteenth century, labor disputes of this magnitude normally were accompanied by serious violence. The ARU leaders were keenly aware of this problem and worried that civil disorder would provide an excuse for the government to intervene and break the strike. Consequently, they urged workers, both in speeches and in telegraph messages, to behave with caution and to avoid situations that might lead to conflict with the authorities. They were not totally successful in this effort, but at least in the Chicago area, the boycott proceeded through the first ten days without serious disruption of the peace. There were some confrontations, but little in the way of serious mob action or violence, and not much property damage. In fact, the Federal Strike Commission, appointed later that year by Cleveland, reported that less than $6,000 in damage to railroad property had occurred by June 5. Thus, in the early phase of the struggle, it appeared that the ARU was succeeding; it had mobilized many thousands of workers, slowed rail traffic significantly, and managed to keep the tendency toward violence reasonably well under control. The GMA, however, did not remain idle, and it commanded powerful resources both economically and politically. Perhaps the most important of these was a direct and sympathetic connection with Richard Olney, the Attorney General of the United States. Before his appointment to Cleveland’s cabinet, Olney had served for thirty-five years as an attorney for railroad

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companies, and as the events unfolded, Olney and the GMA seemed to work in concert. On June 1, acting on a specific request by the GMA, Olney appointed Edwin Walker as special federal attorney whose duty, in effect, was to oversee the operations of the Department of Justice in Chicago. Walker was also employed as an attorney for the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad, one of the companies belonging to the GMA. Two days after his appointment, Walker obtained a sweeping injunction from the federal court that effectively rendered the strike illegal. The court held that the strike obstructed delivery of the mail and (through a rather creative reading of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act) that it constituted a conspiracy to restrain interstate commerce. Moreover, this ruling not only enjoined people from directly participating in boycott or strike activities, but also forbade any person from persuading others to do so. This provision meant that the ARU leaders could not give speeches, write letters, or send telegrams to other members of the union, and thus to comply with it meant that the strike would lose all leadership and coordination. Faced with the dilemma of violating the injunction or abandoning the strike effort, Debs and the other ARU officers decided to ignore the injunction. For this, they were later arrested on two different charges, first (June 10) for engaging in a conspiracy to obstruct the mails and restrain interstate commerce and secondly (June 17) for contempt of court because of their refusal to obey the injunction. In the more immediate situation, the injunction turned the strike into a confrontation between the ARU and its allies and the authority of the federal government. On June 3, a federal marshal, in a telegram also signed by Walker, the federal district attorney, and a federal judge, reported that mob action at Blue Island (an area just outside the city) required urgent attention. Railway cars had been overturned, the mail blocked, and he was unable to enforce the court’s injunction without support from federal forces. When Olney showed the telegram to the president, Cleveland ordered the entire garrison of Fort Sheridan into Chicago. And so on the morning of the fourth, residents of the city awoke to discover federal troops marching through the streets. In making his decision, Cleveland had not consulted with or asked consent from any state or local official in Illinois. Thus, on the morning of the fourth, Governor Altgeld was startled and shocked by the appearance of federal forces. Though unlike Cleveland in many respects, Altgeld shared the president’s fierce sense of commitment to principle, and he was insulted and angered that Cleveland had circumvented state authority. On the fifth, he sent a long telegram requesting that the president rescind his orders and

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move the troops out of Chicago, and when Cleveland declined, Altgeld sent another protest on the sixth.

cleveland v. altgeld: the debate that did not happen Altgeld’s letter of June 5 registers a vigorous and detailed protest against Cleveland’s deployment of federal troops.21 The opening sentences suggest the attitude of a man who has been slighted but who can still control— though just barely—sentiments of justified outrage: “I am advised that you have ordered Federal troops into service in the State of Illinois. Surely the facts have not been correctly presented to you, or you would not have taken this step, for it is entirely unnecessary, and, as it seems to me, entirely unjustifiable.” The second of these sentences sets out the three main arguments of the letter: (1) the facts of the case demonstrate that federal intervention was not needed; (2) federal intervention had no legal or constitutional justification; and (3) Cleveland’s decision was based upon distorted and inaccurate information that came from prejudiced sources. In respect to the first point, Altgeld argues that state and local authorities are in control of the situation and possess sufficient resources to meet any problems that are likely to develop. “Notwithstanding these facts,” Altgeld asserts, “the Federal Government has been applied to by men who had political and selfish motives for wanting to ignore the State Government.” In fact, on the two occasions when the federal marshal for the Southern District applied for aid, “troops were promptly furnished,” and the processes of the courts were fully enforced. The marshal for the Northern District, Altgeld insists, would have received similar aid had he requested it from the state. Altgeld acknowledges that the railroads are now paralyzed at some points, but he maintains that the cause is not obstruction but an inability to find men willing to operate the trains. He cites two examples to support this judgment, and although he concedes that there have been instances where crowds have attempted to disrupt traffic, these have been “local in character” and “easily handled by State authority.” In respect to the legal and constitutional issues, Altgeld notes that Cleveland had justified his action under a war measure passed in 1861 and intended for use only when it proved “impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States within such States by the ordinary judicial procedure.” But, as the previous review of the facts had revealed, no such condition existed

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in Illinois, and hence Cleveland had no legitimate right to intervene. Then, drawing to the close of his argument, Altgeld repeats his concern that the president “has been imposed upon, but even if by a forced construction it were held that the conditions here came within the letter of the statute, then, I submit that local self-government is a fundamental principle of our Constitution.” The issue in question is not federal supremacy, a matter that Altgeld does not “dispute for a moment,” but it pertains to the proper conjunction of federal rule and local self-government. When the president absolutely ignores local government in this matter, he simultaneously insults the people of Illinois and does violence to the Constitution. Thus, in his capacity as governor, Altgeld protests Cleveland’s action and requests “the immediate withdrawal of the Federal troops from active duty in this State.” Of the three points I have identified as the main arguments in this letter, the first two are approached in a clearly marked order and expressed in the terms of deliberative argument. The third point, which refers to the character of Cleveland’s advisors and has a distinctly ad hominem tincture, weaves its way repetitively through the factual and legal argument of the text, and its appearance suggests an appeal to a general audience rather than to the president. Perhaps, then, the letter was designed as popular rhetoric rather than deliberative rhetoric or as a combination of the two. In any case, Cleveland could have responded to it at either (or both) of these levels. He chose none of the above. Just hours after Altgeld’s telegram arrived at the White House, Cleveland sent a reply consisting of two long, legalistic sentences that baldly asserted the president’s authority. Federal troops, Cleveland declared, were sent “in strict accordance with the Constitution and laws of the United States upon the demand of the Postoffice Department” and certain officers of the United States. The use of troops “was deemed not only proper but necessary” to ensure delivery of the mail and counteract conspiracies “against commerce between the States,” and there was no intent to interfere with the peace keeping function of local authorities. Refusing to take no for an answer, Altgeld sent a second telegram on the next day. This time he excluded all reference to the facts and circumstances of the situation and concentrated entirely upon legal and constitutional argument. While he enumerated five separate and apparently distinct objections, Altgeld’s rhetoric congealed into a single accusation—Cleveland was acting the part of a tyrant. His policy, Altgeld argued, granted the president power to intercede in the states at his own discretion, on the basis of any minor disturbance, without consulting any local officials, and with the consequence of placing the civil government of the state under military control. This as-

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sumption of power was an innovation and contrary to the spirit of the law. It would transform a government of law into a “government by caprice of an individual; not even the autocrat of Russia could possess, or claim to possess, greater power than is possessed by the executive of the United States, if your assumption is correct.” Viewed from this perspective, the situation in Illinois was of “no consequence now compared with the far reaching principle involved,” and Altgeld concluded by once again asking the president to order the federal troops to withdraw. Cleveland’s second reply was as prompt as and even more succinct than his first. It read: “While I am still persuaded that I have neither transcended my authority nor duty in the emergency that confronts us, it seems to me that in this hour of danger and public distress, discussion may well give way to active efforts on the part of all in authority to restore obedience to law and order.” As the Nation commented a few days later, the president had wasted “no time in arguing with” Altgeld “or in defending himself against his attacks.”22 In the immediate context, Cleveland’s nonrhetorical response proved successful. As Nevins has demonstrated, the press, the great majority of the political leaders in the country, and the general weight of respectable opinion enthusiastically applauded his handling of the strike and his dismissal of Altgeld.23 Opinion on this matter, however, would shift over time, and as we shall see, the Pullman issue contributed to Cleveland’s demise as a national leader and hastened a major realignment within the Democratic Party. Concerning the response to Algeldt, Cleveland’s curt and direct statements might well have been appropriate and prudent at the time he articulated them. The issues involved concerned the proper constitutional relationship between two units of government, and thus in principle they fell squarely within the domain of deliberative argument where controversy was permitted even under the restrained model of rhetoric. Yet, the dispute arose only after the federal executive had decided upon a policy and set it in motion, and by June 6, the situation had reached crisis proportions. It is difficult to imagine how passions could have been sufficiently hedged or moderated to allow for deliberative argument. Thus, whatever the deliberative force of Altgeld’s protest, the president was not then in a position to accept it as an argumentative challenge. But Cleveland was to prove unable to engage the matter reflectively even under circumstances more favorable to argumentation. Some ten years after the Pullman crisis, Cleveland published a rather long article in McClure’s Magazine entitled “The Government in the Chicago Strike of 1894.” At that distance from the event, we might expect that he would have offered a more deliberatively oriented approach to the issues, but he did not.24

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The article opens with these words: “The President inaugurated on the 4th day of March, 1893, and those associated with him as cabinet officials, encountered during their term of executive duty, unusual and perplexing difficulties. The members of that administration who still survive, in recalling the events of this laborious service, cannot fail to fix upon the year 1894 as the most troublous and anxious of their incumbency.” 25 These two ponderous and impersonal sentences appropriately introduce us to the tone of the whole piece. In dealing with one of the most dramatic and controversial events of the nineteenth century, let alone of his own career, Cleveland presents a plodding, apparently disinterested narrative of events. Where we might expect the former president to speak in his own voice, he cites documentary evidence: “I shall liberally embody documents, order, instructions, and reports which I hope will not prove tiresome, since they supply the facts I desire to present at first hand and more impressively than could be presented by any words of mine.”26 This penchant to rely upon inartistic proof structures the article in a way that encourages attention to isolated detail and that almost precludes deliberative reflection about opposing or alternative perspectives. Toward the end of the article, the narrative brings us to the moment of Altgeld’s protest. “I must not fail,” writes Cleveland, “to mention here as part of the history of this perplexing affair, a contribution made by the Governor of Illinois to its annoyances.” The governor, for reasons that Cleveland cannot fathom, not only failed to recognize the riotous conditions in his state but “actually protested against the presence of federal troops.” Cleveland proceeds to quote large sections of Altgeld’s first letter, commenting only that he finds it “remarkable,” and then reprints his own response. He next quotes excerpts from the introduction and conclusion of the second letter, this time remarking that the body of the text is “rather dreary,” and he recalls that, by this point in the exchange, Altgeld had somewhat strained his patience. As before, Cleveland reprints his response, and he then brings his account to its conclusion: “This closed a discussion, which in its results, demonstrated how far one’s disposition and inclination will lead him astray in the field of argument.”27 I think we might fairly turn this comment, in a slightly modified form, against its author. It is notable how far Cleveland’s disposition and inclination seems to lead him away from argument. He absolutely refuses to recognize the two letters as serious argumentation about a controversial matter, but instead treats them as part of a documentary record, as items that belong in cold storage or, at best, as perplexing curiosities that can be noted, quoted, and observed clinically as examples of political folly.

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In the next and final section of the article, Cleveland does report and quote from the Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of his policy. The Court’s authority, of course, has relevance as an answer to some of Altgeld’s objections, especially those that appear in the second letter. But the decision was hardly uncontroversial, and we might have expected Cleveland to defend it or at least explain how it vindicated him. Once again, however, he refuses to advance an argument of his own and merely cites the Court’s authority as an inartistic proof. Throughout his narrative, Cleveland systematically ignores relevant points raised by Altgeld. For example, he reports that Attorney General Richard Olney appointed “Edwin Walker, an able and prominent attorney in Chicago, as special counsel for the Government.” But Cleveland does not tell his readers that this prominent attorney worked for a railway company, and he thus fails to address Altgeld’s charge that some government officials and advisors had self-interested motives. Cleveland asserts that in early July “there was plenty of violence” in Chicago, “but no application was made to the Federal Government for assistance,” and he implies that this fact demonstrates Altgeld’s incompetence. But the passage totally disregards Altgeld’s argument that the state militia was prepared to deal with the situation and that it had not been called out because local authorities believed it unnecessary to seek assistance from any outside source. Cleveland quotes at length from the two statutes that authorize federal intervention within a state, but he does not take into account Altgeld’s point that these laws were passed in 1861 as war measures and that when Cleveland dispatched troops in Illinois during a time of peace and without consulting state authorities, he had undertaken a wholly unprecedented action.

conclusion: the fall of cleveland and the rise of populist rhetoric Deliberative rhetoric, as Tulis has noted, depends upon institutional and procedural arrangements that dampen passions and open space for reasonable consideration of common interests. This is not the only requirement, however, since as the case we have just studied indicates, deliberation cannot occur unless the parties involved agree to recognize the other and engage in an argumentative encounter. If one of these parties does not accept the responsibility to answer objections raised by the other, then deliberation is impossible, and when conflict occurs between these parties, it can be resolved only through the invocation of authority or the use of force. Within the frame of

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deliberative rhetoric, then, the processes of exclusion may work to limit passion within a network of logical constraints, or it may foster a blind passion that unreflexively excludes whatever falls outside the comfort zone of those who exercise power. In respect to Cleveland, this blind spot was partially a matter of personal temperament, but it was also connected with ideological and rhetorical norms rooted in his culture. Cleveland virtually embodied Victorian liberalism as it existed in the late-nineteenth-century United States, and as result, he was committed, consciously or unconsciously, to beliefs and values alien to those of Altgeld, Debs, and other advocates of collective action by working people. As Melvyn Dubofsky has explained, Victorian legal and political culture entailed a set of deeply held values that made the labor movement appear unintelligible or perverse. These included the deification of individualism, a commitment to natural rights, a dedication to the principle of free labor, and a form of civic republicanism that required vigilant protection of community interests against the selfish interests of private groups. Within the terms of this ideology, “group or collective rights had no standing at law.”28 Thus when a labor organization instituted a strike or boycott to promote the interests of workers, it appeared to adherents of Victorian individualism that it acted against the public interest and in disregard of natural rights. Such activities infringed on the rights of other workers (by preventing them from contracting for their labor with an employer), unfairly restricted the employer’s right to use private property, and represented the effort of a private group to dictate the business practices of others by interfering with the natural processes of the market. From this perspective, then, labor unions represented an attempt by workers to take the law into their own hands and to enforce class-motivated values at the expense of the common good. The court rulings of the period, including the Supreme Court decision in the Pullman case, consistently reflect this set of values and express a rhetoric very similar to the one Cleveland employs in defense of his executive actions. The Pullman strike was one among a number of crises occurring in the 1890s that uncovered and called into question the biases of Victorian liberalism and that set in motion reform efforts. Populist rhetoric became a primary tool used in support of these efforts. In their attacks against the relatively closed deliberative practices of the judicial and executive branches of the federal government, reformers used the platform and the press to mobilize public opinion and render it more sensitive to the demands of an industrialized society. This was the strategy that Altgeld pursued after the Pullman strike. Determined to rid the Democratic Party of “Cleveland and Clevelan-

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dism,” he took his case to the party membership through a vigorous oratorical campaign that denounced the president and heaped scorn on his policy of “government by injunction.” While in his letters to Cleveland, Altgeld demonstrated some degree of the restraint appropriate to deliberation, his post-Pullman rhetoric expressed a full-throated populism. Thus, when invited to address the Democratic Iroquois Club of Illinois on the occasion of Jefferson’s birthday, Altgeld used the opportunity to map the distance between the founder of his party and its current leader: “Jeffersonism was the first-born of the new age of liberty and human progress, while Clevelandism is the slimy off-spring of that unhallowed marriage between Standard Oil and Wall Street. . . . Jefferson belonged to the American people; Cleveland to the men who devour widow’s homes. Jeffersonism is an illumination on the American firmament; Clevelandism merely a swamp-light floating around in the Standard Oil Marsh.”29 At the Democratic National Convention of 1896, Altgeld witnessed the realization of his goal. Cleveland’s leadership was repudiated, his policies renounced, and his wing of the party, which had been dominant for more than two decades, was shattered. Altgeld’s preferred candidate, “Silver Dick” Bland of Missouri did not win the nomination, but perhaps it was more significant that the nomination went to the greatest popular orator of the day and as a result of the most potent display of populist rhetoric in the nation’s history. William Jennings Bryan lost the general election, but change continued. Victorian individualism was increasingly challenged by ideologies that recognized class interests and collective rights, that sought to harmonize or balance these rights and interests with a conception of the common good, and that gave priority to social welfare over the natural operations of the marketplace. Along with these ideological developments came new political vocabularies and new rhetorical modalities for addressing national issues. Like Jeffrey Tulis, I am prepared to “reverse the common assumption that ideas are ‘epiphenomenal,’ that is, mere reflections of important political developments, and entertain the possibility that thought might constitute politics.”30 And all of us are in Tulis’s debt for his masterful explication of the interconnection between theory and practice in Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric and its subsequent effect on the U.S. presidency. Yet, before Wilson and before Theodore Roosevelt, there was the Pullman strike, the crisis of the 1890s, and the emergence of a populist rhetoric that challenged both the rhetorical boundaries the Founders had sought to establish for the presidency and the ideological constraints imposed by Victorian liberalism.

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Without doubting the force and importance of Wilson’s ideas about rhetoric, we should also understand the larger context in which they occurred, since we are always best advised to think of rhetoric not just as ideas, or modes of expressing those ideas, or as the contexts that spawn and restrict their expression, but as a fusion of all these elements. And it seems equally important for us to recognize the fact that rhetoric is a polysemous term and that its practice takes many different forms. If we intend to use rhetoric as a resource for interpreting complex historical developments, we need to exercise great care in sorting out its different meanings and manifestations.

notes 1. Quoted in Allan Nevins, Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage (New York: Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1932), 68. 2. In Grover Cleveland 1837–1908: Chronology-Documents-Bibliographic Aids, ed. Robert I. Vexler (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y: Oceana, 1968), 37. 3. Ibid., 78. 4. Nevins, Grover Cleveland, 766. 5. Alyn Brodsky, Grover Cleveland: A Study in Character (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 3. Another recent biography, H. Paul Jeffers, An Honest President: The Life and Presidencies of Grover Cleveland (NewYork: HarperCollins, 2000) conveys, as the title of the book suggests, a similar attitude toward its subject. The most recent biography, Henry F. Graff, Grover Cleveland (New York: Henry Holt, 2002) presents a more even-handed account of the man, but the book jacket testifies to the persistence of the conventional image when it declares that Graff “traces the life of a historically significant chief executive who never curried the people’s favor, yet won it just the same.” 6. Vincent P. DeSantis, The Shaping of Modern America: 1877–1920, 2nd ed. (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Forum Press, 1989), 54. 7. Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager, and William E. Leuchtenburgh, The Growth of the American Republic, Vol. 2, 7th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980): 161. 8. Ibid., 174. 9. Richard E. Welch, The Presidencies of Grover Cleveland (Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 1988), 9. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. It is interesting to consider the difference between “nonrhetorical” and “antirhetorical.” The distinction depends on an assessment of motive. If we think of Cleveland as “nonrhetorical,” then we would regard his image as a “manly” man of fixed and resolute principle as the natural and uncontrived result of his character. If we think of him as “antirhetorical,” then we might say that he engaged in the rhetoric of antirhetoric. That is, he consciously projected a “manly” image, a stolid appearance and personality, and used laconic and plain speech so that he would appear not to be an ordinary politician who trafficked in rhetoric. Thus, his nonrhetorical appearance would be a rhetorical construction devised for persuasive purposes. As Wright suggests, a just assessment of Cleveland would fall between these two extremes but would likely come closer to the nonrhetorical than to

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the antirhetorical pole. As I will indicate below, the notion of antirhetoric in this sense has some interest when we try to assess Cleveland’s responses to Altgeld during the Pullman strike. 13. Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 85. 14. See Karen S. Hoffman, “Going Public in the Nineteenth Century: Grover Cleveland’s Repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5 (2002): 57–77. Hoffman concludes that Cleveland employed rhetoric not in respect to some particular speech or act or tactic but in the sense that his “overall behavior persuaded the public to support his legislative goal,” 73. 15. Nevins, Grover Cleveland, 679. 16. Welch, Presidencies of Grover Cleveland, 10. 17. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency, 4. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 44. 20. Almont Lindsey’s The Pullman Strike (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942) remains the most comprehensive and authoritative narrative account of the strike, and I have used it as the source of the facts and events in the pages that follow. For more recent scholarship, see Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 177–270. Richard Schneirov, Shelton Stromquist, and Nick Salvatoe, eds., The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s: Essays on Labor and Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 21. All references to and quotations from the correspondence between Altgeld and Cleveland are taken from the version printed in Waldo R. Browne, Altgeld of Illinois: A Record of his Life and Work (B.W. Huebsch: New York, 1924), 128–39. 22. Quoted in Harry Barnard, Eagle Forgotten: The Turbulent Life of John Peter Altgeld (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs Merrill, 1938), 307. 23. Nevins, Grover Cleveland, 624–26, and also see 626–28 for an assessment of the later, and far less favorable, consequences of Cleveland’s policy. 24. In relation to my earlier comments about nonrhetoric and antirhetoric (see note 12 above), the thinness of argument in Cleveland’s article suggests that his response to the strike might well have been nonrhetorical and in no way a ploy rhetorically designed to win approval. 25. Grover Cleveland, “The Government in the Chicago Strike of 1984,” McClure’s Magazine 23 (July 1904): 227. 26. Ibid., 231. 27. Ibid., 238–39. 28. Melvin Dubofsky, “The Federal Judiciary, Free Labor and Equal Rights,” in Schneirov, Stromquist, and Salvatore, The Pullman Strike, 161. 29. Quoted in Barnard, Eagle Forgotten, 350–51. Barnard narrates Altgeld’s campaign against Cleveland in vivid detail, 321–73. 30. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency, 17.

William McKinley and the Emergence of the Modern Rhetorical Presidency william d. harpine

Commander in chief during a crucial period of U.S. history, William McKinley is today sometimes dismissed as a tired, unenthusiastic president who followed more than he led. Margaret Leech’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, In the Days of McKinley, did much to draw the public’s interest back toward McKinley several decades after his death, but it may have reinforced the unfortunate opinion of McKinley as a weak, vacillating leader.1 That McKinley was a shy, private man, an individual of great good will and personable disposition, renders this mistaken view all too plausible. McKinley’s activities as president included a speaking campaign to convince the public to endorse the annexation of the Philippine Islands at the close of the 1898 Spanish-American War. McKinley’s last speech ended his speaking career with a flourish, as this prominent advocate of America first spoke out for expanding foreign trade. Like his successor Theodore Roosevelt, McKinley understood that the presidency was a bully pulpit; however, perhaps even more than Roosevelt, McKinley understood— grasped as if by instinct—that the president identified and articulated the nation’s principles. Thus, McKinley stands as the major transitional figure toward the rhetorical presidency. Nonetheless, consistently aware of presidential tradition, McKinley tended to hint at policy issues without advocating them outright. He often eschewed the kind of point-by-point policy analysis that typified

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the rhetoric of some later presidents. His most celebrated policy speech, delivered to the Home Market Club in Boston on February 16, 1899, discussed overseas expansion after, not before, the Senate’s vote to ratify the Treaty of Paris. This treaty, which annexed Puerto Rico and the Philippine Islands, marked U.S. overseas expansion. When the United States prepared for the 1848 Mexican War, U.S. expansionists used the term Manifest Destiny to justify the acquisition of foreign territory. This bellicose phrase, which implied a positive moral obligation to expand, was said to be the coinage of a Democratic leader, John L. O’Sullivan.2 The early advocates of Manifest Destiny applied the term to continental expansion, the contention being that the United States should fill what they felt to be its geographically natural borders.3 An obvious difference between the Mexican War and the Spanish-American War is that an ocean separates the United States from the Philippine Islands. McKinley never spoke in terms of Manifest Destiny, but the concept underlay the controversies of the time. McKinley introduced what was, very likely, the United States’ boldest foreign policy venture: the Pacific empire.4 In several speaking tours, he prepared public opinion for this seemingly radical policy, at the same time conveying the impression that he, as president, was somehow above the fray of politics and, even more remarkably, by tying that policy to U.S. traditions. McKinley’s presidential rhetoric fell more or less into four stages: 1. Early in his presidency, McKinley gave relatively few speeches, at least compared to more recent presidents, and these speeches took on a stylized and ritualistic tone: he spoke at ceremonies to advocate love of country. He gave no speeches during the hostilities with Spain. 2. After the Spanish-American War, McKinley delivered quite a few speeches that sounded similar to his earlier speeches but which had acquired an underlying policy theme. They were subtle: the president’s advocacy of the annexation of the Philippine Islands becomes obvious only upon close inspection. 3. After the ratification of the peace treaty with Spain, he began to give speeches that addressed his specific program. Thus, his explicit advocacy of policy was ex post facto: a defense of his policies, not an attempt to get them adopted. Many, but not all, of these speeches continued in a quasi-ceremonial style. 4. McKinley’s last speech in Buffalo, delivered shortly before his assassination, was his boldest effort to shape future policy. In this speech, perhaps, the rhetorical presidency had its true beginning.

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Jeffrey Tulis argues that, starting with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, “Presidents regularly ‘go over the heads’ of Congress to the people at large in support of legislation and other initiatives.” Tulis considers this to be “a profound development in American politics.” 5 He finds that McKinley “pushed against clearly perceived limits” by giving many speeches, but does not believe that McKinley advocated policy initiatives to the public. As this chapter demonstrates, however, McKinley pushed against previous limits even more forcefully than that: he did, with tact and subtlety, go over the heads of Congress to the people to advocate and, sometimes, to articulate policy. It should seem unlikely that Roosevelt, astute though he was, discovered the value of such rhetoric all at once. The rhetorical presidency emerged over time. Furthermore, McKinley was as active a public speaker as Roosevelt, if not more so, and clearly understood the importance of swaying public opinion toward his views.6 For most of his public career, McKinley advocated the protective tariff. During his 1896 campaign, McKinley told a group of Pennsylvania steelworkers, “Gentlemen, I have always been, as you know, in favor of a protective tariff. [Loud and continuous applause.]” 7 He reiterated this view at the outset of his 1900 campaign.8 Ironically, however, foreign policy dominated his presidency. Long-standing tradition required the president to stay above the fray of everyday politics, sending policy messages directly to Congress. As Mel Laracey notes, however, presidents had found several ways to go straight to the public about policy issues.9 McKinley’s predecessor, the conservative Democrat Grover Cleveland, was generally much more reticent than McKinley turned out to be. Nonetheless, Cleveland did appeal directly to the public with a masterfully contrived State of the Union message. Custom required presidents to send an annual written message to Congress. Much like more recent messages, these often covered an array of topics. Cleveland’s message of December 6, 1887, however, constituted a remarkable argument for lowering the protective tariffs. He pointed out that the government was operating at a huge surplus, thus taking money out of popular circulation. He brought up various dollar amounts and, by way of example, gave an extended discussion of the plight of sheep growers. He called for a “spirit higher than partisanship.”10 This message was published “in full” in “every important newspaper in the country.”11 Concerned about conditions in Cuba, and presaging the conflict that would be left for McKinley to manage, Cleveland warned in his 1896 message to Congress that the United States might not be able to remain neutral in the face of the Cuban crisis.12

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the first stage: ceremonial speaking Unlike Cleveland, McKinley went to the public quite often during his presidency. At first, however, he seemed to address policies no more often than did Cleveland. During this first stage of his speechmaking, McKinley’s purpose was simply to reinforce values. For example, speaking at an exposition commemorating Tennessee’s centennial during the summer of 1897, McKinley praised Tennessee, whose founders “had forced their way through the trackless forests of this splendid domain,” and who carried with them “the same high ideals and fearless devotion to home and country . . . which have everywhere made illustrious the American character.”13 He told a group in Buffalo, New York, the story of a brave Union color-bearer during the Civil War, followed by his unifying assertion that “The army of Grant and the army of Lee are together. [Applause.] They are now one and in faith, in hope, in fraternity, in purpose, and an invincible patriotism.”14 Similarly, the president told a gathering at the Ohio State Fair in September 1897 that “There is a flag in the hand of every child, and patriotism in every man’s heart.”15 Over the years, McKinley issued some rather vacuous Thanksgiving proclamations. On July 6, 1898, with the Spanish-American War still in progress, McKinley released a written message on behalf of “Thanksgiving and Prayer.” He mentioned the “unprecedented success” of the United States Navy in Manila Bay, asked the citizens to “reverently bow before the throne of divine grace,” and suggested that the nation owned “thanks” and “prayers” on behalf of “our gallant sons.” He concluded with a hope that God would “speedily remove from us the untold afflictions of war.”16 What is interesting is how easily McKinley employed similar rhetoric when he was really advocating policies.

the second stage: after the war Although still value-laden, McKinley’s speeches changed after the SpanishAmerican War. McKinley had been manipulating the peace negotiations with an eye toward acquiring at least some of the Philippine Islands for the United States. This inevitably led to controversy. These islands were remote from U.S. territory; the population seemed alien in culture and ethnicity, and many Americans felt that to rule another nation ran counter to U.S. institutions. Ratification of an expansionist treaty in the Senate being no foregone

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conclusion, McKinley worked to tie expansion into traditional American values, even though the policy was far from traditional, while deftly avoiding clear statements in favor of expansion. Thus, McKinley sounded just as ceremonial as he did earlier, but he now implied programmatic ideas. This reserved approach, so typical of McKinley’s entire career, yielded the startling result of persuading without seeming to persuade.17

McKinley’s Expansionist Agenda McKinley did not go on a speaking tour to convince the public of the need for war and did not speak in public during the war; he issued only routine government proclamations during that time. The quick victory over the Spanish forces brought to the fore a number of very difficult questions. The military’s victory produced a seeming fait accompli: suddenly, the United States of America inherited an overseas empire. Most prominently in the public mind, this empire included not only close neighbors of the United States like Puerto Rico and Cuba, but also several far-flung Pacific Islands: the Hawaiian archipelago, Guam, and most surprising to many Americans, the Philippines. In fact, U.S. policy toward the Philippines became the focus of much of McKinley’s presidential rhetoric. Historians continue to debate McKinley’s private views on expansion. Although some have judged McKinley to have been a vacillating, weak leader who went to war only because he was forced to do so, and who delegated the decision about expansion to others, other scholars now conclude that McKinley sought expansion much earlier than what had been believed. Such evidence as exists seems to indicate that McKinley’s reticence was more that of a card player than that of a timid clerk—that he manipulated the situation so that he would be pushed in exactly the direction that he planned to go all along. This view is reinforced by Charles Emory Smith’s observation that McKinley had decided to keep the Philippines by the end of the war, and that he met privately with members of Congress to ensure support for this outcome. As postmaster general, Smith was privy to McKinley’s cabinet discussions. Smith concluded that McKinley “led public sentiment quite as much as public sentiment led him.”18 Guided by his keen political instincts, McKinley saw that to persuade Congress required him to persuade the public. He also understood that the ultimate success of his policy in the Philippines would require widespread public endorsement. McKinley’s reliance on traditional values has struck various observers. Feeling that scholars have failed to appreciate McKinley as a rhetorician,

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Robert L. Ivie shows how one of McKinley’s postwar speeches addressed values, with McKinley weaving “a pattern of interrelated themes,” using “national praise” to appeal to “national pride, moral duty, and historical sanction” in a way that drew on “basic elements” of the nation’s “value system.”19 Similarly, Ivie explicates how McKinley used a vocabulary of humanitarian appeals in his war message to Congress.20 Kurt Ritter and James R. Andrews note McKinley’s appeal to the values of the American Revolution in a speech justifying the acquisition of the Philippines.21 Admitting that McKinley’s October 1898 speeches appear “stuffed with generalities,” Lewis L. Gould still feels that these speeches were “masterful examples of how an adroit leader can set the terms of a public discussion in his own favor.”22 Although the United States had expanded steadily throughout its history, often through warfare, the idea of conquering and ruling an Asian island chain troubled the nation’s political consciousness far more than had the decision to annex California or New Mexico. The annexation of Puerto Rico and Guam caused little domestic distress, nor did the decision to grant independence to Cuba arouse any hullabaloo, but the Philippines were another matter. Many Americans could not imagine how these people could possibly integrate themselves into American life, nor did all citizens understand what relationship the United States might have with them. Furthermore, no one really seemed to grasp what obligations the United States might acquire by keeping the conquered territory. McKinley seems to have decided on his own to go to war. After meeting with McKinley, his confidante Charles Dawes noted in March 1898 that McKinley preferred to avoid war. Dawes said, however, that the president intended to “intervene to stop the suffering” and was prepared to “use force.”23 He also told Dawes that “impatience is not patriotism.”24 McKinley personally approved the attack on Manila Bay.25 In June 1898, with hostilities still in progress, McKinley suggested to his advisors to let Spain keep the Philippines, subject to an immediate end to the fighting. By the end of July, McKinley wanted to get some benefit for the United States from the war in the Philippines and there is evidence that he had already decided to retain them.26 Nonetheless, Charles Emory Smith, a member of McKinley’s cabinet, noted later that McKinley had not reached a definite decision in August 1898 when combat against Spain came to an end. Nonetheless, once the negotiations began in earnest, Smith remembered McKinley as “firm and unfaltering” in insisting on the Philippines.27 For one thing, the United States desired to obtain naval bases in the western Pacific.28 McKinley stayed in close touch with the Peace Commission by

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telegram.29 On September 16, 1898, McKinley advised the commission that, at the least, the United States should retain Luzon.30 However, commission chair William R. Day quoted to McKinley the president’s assurance that the Philippines were negotiable, but this was in part a response to Spain’s early refusal to discuss the topic.31 Jacob Schurman, president of the First Philippine Commission, commented in 1902 that McKinley had told him, “I didn’t want the Philippine Islands, either, . . . but—in the end there was no alternative.”32 Thus, McKinley most likely intended his speeches of late 1898 and early 1899 to persuade the public to accept a decision that he had already made. Although McKinley spoke on many subjects during his presidency, the overriding question during his administration was the Philippines—which, in turn, became a proxy for the spreading U.S. empire. The consequences were grave, not in the least because Philippine insurgents fought a long, brutal, and rather dirty war to throw out the Americans who had come to liberate them. The peace would ultimately become bloodier than the war. The revolt endured for two nightmarish years.33 McKinley’s rhetoric addressed the war and the treaty only in the broadest terms. Although national debate would seem to have been in order, McKinley’s overt part in that debate was minimal. Yet, in holding himself above the fray, McKinley vanquished his opponents.

Anti-Expansionists Against McKinley McKinley’s once and future political opponent, William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska, exerted his considerable oratorical skill in 1898 and 1899 to oppose expansion.34 Bryan stated in December 1898 that “History will vindicate the position taken by the United States in the war with Spain” but argued against any “scheme for the colonization of the Orient.”35 In a lengthy essay in the New York Journal in January 1899, Bryan discussed the expense of keeping a colony, the dangers that he believed Filipino immigration posed, the hazards and costs of a standing army, and various other very specific, clearly argued points against annexation.36 Arguing against an imperialist policy, former member of Congress and Tammany Hall leader W. Bourke Cockran stated in February 1899 that “Civilization by slaughter is not an original device.”37 Senator George Vest of Missouri, a former Confederate soldier, told the Senate that the Dred Scott decision outlawed expansion, which he termed a “monstrous proposition.”38 A year later, Representative Champ Clark of Missouri commented that “In the hands of

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political jobbers the American flag, like the mantle of charity, will be made to cover a multitude of sins.”39

McKinley’s Rhetorical Agenda The key question to be settled by the Treaty of Paris, which formally ended the war, was whether the United States would retain the Philippines. In a February 1899 speech, Bryan endorsed the treaty in the mistaken belief that the treaty “clears the way for the recognition of a Philippine republic.”40 Southern Democrats also opposed retaining the Philippines.41 Brian P. Damiani argues, rather unflatteringly, that McKinley was not a vigorous advocate of expansion, and was motivated by “a misguided sense of responsibility” for the Filipinos and “an exaggerated notion” of public support for expansion.42 A notably private president, McKinley often kept his own counsel and left few records of his ruminations. One must often accumulate insights into his thoughts from various subtle and indirect sources of information.43 This is partly because McKinley led with great subtlety. His biographer Charles Olcott noted that McKinley “cared nothing about the credit, but McKinley always had his way.”44 What was McKinley’s purpose during his tour of the Midwest in the autumn of 1898? Some authorities believe that McKinley undertook this tour to drum up public support for this decision and that he wished to help midwestern Republican candidates.45 Damiani feels that McKinley went on tour to gauge public opinion on the Philippines. He bases this claim on the view that McKinley would give “several brief speeches not to delineate administration policy, but rather to test public sentiment.”46 Julius W. Pratt seems to agree, commenting on “the many references to ‘destiny,’ ‘duty,’ ‘humanity,’ and ‘the hand of Almighty god.’”47 In October, the government still insisted in public that the Philippine question was not yet even under deliberation at the peace conference.48 Once one perceives the subtle nature of McKinley’s rhetoric, however, his approach seems much more sophisticated. McKinley did advocate a policy, and he gave these speeches to endorse the work of the commission then negotiating in Europe. However, he studiously avoided debating his critics issue by issue. Instead, he justified his policies by expressing values and glorifying the nation’s heroes: seeking to captivate his listeners rather than to argue. For several months, many of McKinley’s public speeches offered as their ostensible theme the praise of U.S. veterans. Some speeches did nothing

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else. Speaking to the veterans of the battle of San Juan Hill at Camp Wikoff in New York early in September 1898, McKinley commented that “I am honored to meet the brave men who stand before me to-day. I bring you the gratitude of the nation, to whose history you have added, by your valor, a new and glorious page.” He mentioned their “personal bravery” as well as the “admiration” that the nation felt toward them.49

Manifest Destiny? Toward the middle of September, up-and-coming Republican Albert J. Beveridge gave his famous speech on the “March of the Flag.” Positively dripping with Manifest Destiny, this speech proudly rallied the expansionists. Reviewing the westward expansion of a generation earlier, Beveridge protested that “those who deny the power of free institutions to expand urged every argument, and more, that we hear, to-day; but . . . the march of the flag went on!” He argued that “the ocean does not separate us from lands of our duty and desire—the oceans join us, rivers never to be dredged, canals never to be repaired.”50 McKinley’s measured, dignified, conciliatory rhetoric, carefully denying territorial ambitions, presents quite a contrast.

McKinley’s Fall Speaking Tour A few weeks after Beveridge’s rabble-rousing address, McKinley’s speaking evolved in a subtle but important way. Following his brother-in-law’s funeral in Canton, Ohio, McKinley left for Omaha on October 10 on a nicely outfitted special train.51 Although his speech in Omaha was to be the feature event, McKinley set his themes during his numerous brief speeches en route. During an impromptu speech at DeKalb, Illinois, on October 11, McKinley commented that “there has never been a time in our history when patriotism has been more marked or more universal than it is to-day.” In almost the same breath, however, he remarked that “the same high purpose which characterized the conduct of the people in war will influence and control them in the settlements of peace.”52 The tone of this last comment cannot have surprised the audience; it slipped into the speech unaffectedly, tying the values of the war to the values that would mold the treaty. Yet this differed from the Camp Wikoff speech: it claimed that the peace proposal, whose expansionist outlines McKinley could by now surely predict, should receive support precisely because of those values. Nonetheless, McKinley asserted it without proof; he did not

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even mention the peace settlement’s provisions. His argument, if argument it was, was elliptical and value-laden. Its power arose not from a line of reasoning, but from presidential authority. McKinley hinted at but did not advocate a policy. That same day, McKinley advised an audience at Clinton, Iowa, that “We have . . . a good national conscience, and we have the courage of destiny. [Great applause.]” He asserted that “The army and navy of the United States have won not only praise, but the admiration of the world. [Cheers.]” After remarking on the extent of the nation’s unity during the war, McKinley continued that a united citizenry “must act together.” Not only that, but “we want to continue to act together until the fruits of our war shall be embodied in solemn and permanent settlements. [Applause.]”53 McKinley had still not specifically mentioned the annexation of the Philippines. If he had, the divisions on that topic might have intruded into the audience’s awareness. His assertion grew from glorifying the military and praising national unity. He implied that the peace settlement, although described in no detail whatsoever, would uphold those same values. He further implied that opposition to that settlement would contradict national unity. Steaming on to Cedar Rapids, McKinley told a waiting crowd that the purpose of his tour was “that I may celebrate with my fellow-countrymen of the West the progress of the war thus far made—the protocol already signed and the suspension of hostilities,” hoping “that . . . the treaty may be one founded in right and justice and in the interest of humanity [Applause].” McKinley assured his audience that “We accepted war for humanity.” He continued: “We can accept no terms of peace which shall not be in the interest of humanity.” Yet, he still did not mention what those terms might be. He paused to praise the nation’s women, who “never hesitated or murmured, freely offering their best beloved on the altar of their country.”54 In this speech, McKinley put extravagant praise of the nation’s brave and patriotic citizenry at the front. At the same time, he wove an appeal for the as-yet-unfinished peace treaty into his line of reasoning. He did not say that the peace treaty would be good because it annexed territory, but because it promoted the benevolent values for which the nation’s soldiers and sailors had made such noble sacrifices. McKinley repeated this appeal in a brief speech at Belle Plaine, Iowa. He praised the support of Iowans during the war, stating that “Her sons . . . were among the first at the front.” He then pointed out examples of the humanity with which American warriors had conducted themselves: a ship commander who told the crew, “Don’t cheer, the poor fellows are dying;” another naval

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captain who ordered, “Don’t fire, the flag has gone down,” and so forth. “We seem almost to get a glance,” McKinley said, “of the divine spark in the nobility of the men who participated in our war. [Great applause.]” Then, however, McKinley concluded by addressing his hope “that the conclusion of this war, as written in public treaty, shall be a triumph for humanity. [Great applause.]”55 McKinley asserted his ambiguous policy without support, albeit with plenty of flair, by tying it to examples that illustrated U.S. humanitarianism. At Tama, Iowa, McKinley mentioned “the brave men from every State in the Union, North and South, on land and on sea.” He also, however, expressed his desire “to see to it that in the final settlement of this controversy we shall have the glorious fulfillment of the best aspirations of the American people. We want to preserve carefully all the old life of the nation,—the dear old life of the nation and our cherished institutions,—but we do not want to shirk a single responsibility that has been put upon us by the results of the war. [Great applause.]”56 In this cleverly worded passage, McKinley implied that the United States had a positive duty to rule the Philippines because of the nation’s traditions. Yet the policy still receives no explicit statement. Steaming on to Ames, Iowa, home of what was then called the Agricultural College of Iowa, McKinley cleverly adapted to his audience of academics. He told them that “The citizenship that comes out of the schools of the country is the hope of the country.” He then hinted at the greatness of the future peace treaty: “And then what results have been accomplished for humanity, for civilization, against oppression! [Great applause.] Of which results we need not speak now, for these results are yet unknown and unwritten.”57 To assume that the treaty would be noble if one truly did not know its substance might seem presumptuous, yet in Carroll, Iowa, McKinley’s theme of impending greatness further emerged. “The past of our country is secure,” he assured his listeners, “and it is glorious. It is the future with which we have to deal.” He remarked that the end of the war brought with it “the gravest national problems.” These problems called for the “soberest judgment and the most conservative and considerate action.” He again tied the greatness of the nation to its obligation to manage the Philippines: “We have a great country—we will be excused if we say the greatest country in the world; great in its possibilities, great in its opportunities. And with these rest upon all of us great responsibilities.”58 If the treaty gave independence to the acquired territories, it would be difficult to imagine what “great responsibilities” McKinley might have had in mind. McKinley offered no argument per se for annexing the Philippines. He linked marginally related ideas: the nation is great, so it must accept great responsibilities.

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McKinley could have taken a different rhetorical course. His references to the peace settlement were brief, vague, and open to interpretation. If pressed, McKinley could easily have denied that he had advocated a policy at all. The nation was great, which implied that it should do great things. The soldiers and sailors were brave; the nation should honor them by keeping the territory that they won in battle. Our democratic institutions were noble; let us spread them to parts of the world that have known oppression. McKinley argued by implication. It was therefore no surprise that an audience at Denison, Iowa, heard McKinley comment on the nation’s unity, concluding that “As they were united in the war, so they will be united until peace finally comes—a peace founded upon right and justice and humanity. [Great applause.]”59 It was debatable whether annexing the Philippines was a decision of right, justice, and humanity, but McKinley could evade such debate by cloaking his policies in vague language and associating them with national praise. When McKinley gave a major address at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition in Omaha the next day, his message was almost foreordained. McKinley spoke at the Music Pavilion late in the morning on the exposition’s third day. The event was billed as a “peace jubilee” and “president’s day.” A newspaper account indicates that McKinley was greeted with five minutes of applause.60 He began, in typical McKinley style, by praising his audience and discussing the importance of expositions. He stated that the nation had “with additions to our territory and slight changes in our laws” managed to abide by “the spirit of the Constitution.” He remarked on “the noble self-sacrifice and far-seeing sagacity of our ancestors.” In this way, he linked tradition to a radically new foreign policy. He easily slid from that point into his thesis: “we have avoided the temptations of conquest in the spirit of gain.”61 This comment preempted any charges that the United States was becoming an aggressive colonial power, not by citing particulars to prove the opposite, but by flattery. To refute this point on its own ground, his opponents would have to attack the nobility of the nation’s very spirit—a difficult rhetorical task. McKinley continued by remarking on the “the humanity of our purposes and the magnanimity of our conduct” in the war. He praised the American soldiers and sailors, assuring the audience that “The heroes of Manila and Santiago and Porto [sic] Rico have made immortal history.” He implied that to repudiate the accomplishments of the peace negotiations would be to sully the honor of the nation’s heroes, who “will never tolerate impeachment, either direct or indirect, of those who won a peace whose great gain to civilization is yet unknown and unwritten. [Tremendous applause.]” Since it was

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still “unwritten,” McKinley’s view that the gain would be great was a matter of faith. He asserted that the war was fought with “divine favor.” He said that the United States had been blameless in starting the war, and denied responsibility for the difficulties at the peace table: “The war was no more invited by us than were the questions which are laid at our door by its results. [Great applause.] Now as then we will do our duty. [Continued applause.]”62 McKinley’s rhetoric on his trip back to Washington followed the same vein. Speaking from a decorated platform, he told a group in Glenwood, Iowa, that “all through the war we have mingled with our heroism our splendid and glorious humanity.”63 In Red Oak, Iowa, he said that he was happy to be in the hometown of a sailor, Engineer Merritt, who had died in Havana harbor.64 At the conclusion of a speech in St. Louis, McKinley implied that opposing the peace settlement would actually be unpatriotic. “Let no discordant voice,” he urged, “intrude to embarrass us in the solution of the mighty problems.” He denied that God would give blessings to a nation that “is not ready to respond to the call of supreme duty.”65 In context, one presumes the supreme duty to be expansion. Conversely, in a very brief talk at Hastings, Iowa, McKinley actually gave an economic argument for annexation: “we want new markets, and as trade follows the flag, it looks very much as if we were going to have new markets. [Applause.]”66 McKinley’s rhetoric must have frustrated his opponents: such rhetoric is difficult to refute with arguments. An editorial in the conservative Democratic New York Times ruefully noted the ceremonial quality of McKinley’s rhetoric: they said that the president was “unwise” to support his case with an appeal “to ‘the men who planned and achieved the victories.’” They argued that the military, if allowed to speak, “would be the first to condemn the prostitution of the army to politics.”67 Several days later, in Columbus, Ohio, McKinley addressed the same questions with even greater force. The war, McKinley pledged, was fought “for no other purpose but that of humanity.” He bestowed “All honor to the regulars and volunteers [cheering], and to the marines [cheers], black and white, of every nationality [cheers], who marched under the glorious banner of the free to a victory for God and civilization.” Manifest Destiny stayed in the background, however. Only on the rarest occasions did McKinley mention expansion as a benefit of the SpanishAmerican War. More often he stressed the nation’s moral obligations, not its destiny or rights. As the Columbus speech continued, however, McKinley remarked jovially about the extent of the nation, commenting that “Some additions have been made since I left you. [Laughter and applause.]” He

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announced that the nation’s duty was “to take up and perform, and as free, strong brave people, accept the trust which civilization puts upon us. [Enthusiastic cheers and applause.]”68 This statement, predating the treaty’s ratification by months, implied expansion to be a fait accompli. If trust included governing remote territories, McKinley implied, how could the nation dishonor the brave soldiers and sailors by shirking that trust?

McKinley’s Southern Tour McKinley toured the South after the November elections. The November election results had been mixed. A Democratic/Populist majority took over the House of Representatives, while the Republicans gained firm control of the Senate.69 Speaking at an exposition in Atlanta, McKinley addressed with renewed vigor the task of obtaining support for the treaty, now signed and awaiting Senate ratification. A parade began the day with ten army divisions, a group of Confederate veterans, and about a thousand “members of secret orders,” together with various local organizations. The president rode in a carriage with military escort.70 A Union veteran speaking in the Deep South, McKinley sought unity, not conflict. He told the Georgians that “Under hostile fire on a foreign soil, fighting in a common cause, the memory of old disagreements has faded into history.” Furthering the theme of national unity, he noted that former Confederates marched into war under the United States’ flag.71 This unifying appeal to the flag led immediately to an extraordinary advocacy of annexation: “That flag has been planted in two hemispheres, and there it remains the symbol of liberty and law, of peace and progress. [Great applause.] Who will withdraw from the people over whom it floats its protecting folds? Who will haul it down? Answer me, ye men of the South, who is there in Dixie who will haul it down? [Tremendous applause.]”72 The territory acquired under the treaty came “not as the result of a crusade or conquest,” McKinley asserted, “but as the reward of temperate, faithful, and fearless response to the call of conscience.” Specifically endorsing the treaty, McKinley asked whether the nation would “turn timidly away from the duties imposed upon the country by its own great deeds?”73 McKinley’s rhetoric of unity and praise directly advocated a policy. The greatness of the deeds of war became evidence for the morality and wisdom of the peace accords. Logically, McKinley’s appeal made little sense, since a war bravely fought can end with an unjust treaty, but within the context of McKinley’s rhetorical approach, it is entirely consistent. The nation entered into war for

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noble purposes and fought the war with humanity. The nation’s greatness, McKinley implied, assured the nation’s magnanimity in peace. All the same, the absence of argument for the policy is striking. Impressed by McKinley’s visit, which included a promise to provide proper care for Confederate dead, the Georgia legislature promptly voted to endorse McKinley’s handling of the war.74 After McKinley’s appearance in the South, the liberal Democratic newspaper Cleveland Plain Dealer editorialized about the propriety of McKinley’s wearing a Confederate badge. McKinley wrote back to the editor that “I felt especially pleased at the warm welcome extended to me by ex-Confederates on my trip through the South.”75 McKinley’s appeal to unity invariably came to the forefront. By December 1898, the treaty neared completion. William Day of the Peace Commission wrote to McKinley: “At last a treaty seems in sight. Yet nothing is sure with a Spaniard until it is done.”76 In his written message to Congress, McKinley commented that the Philippine rebels did not understand America’s purposes, and stressed that “the rebellion must be put down. Civil government cannot be thoroughly established until order is restored.”77 Several days later, McKinley spoke about the war in Macon, Georgia. “Never was there a more magnificent army mustered,” he said, “and never was there an army mustered for a holier cause, or under a more glorious flag than the Stars and Stripes. [Cheers and great applause.]” This resembled his October speeches. He then, however, turned his attention to the newly signed (but unratified) treaty: “On the twenty-fourth day of this month, the day before Christmas, our peace commissioners will deliver to the President of the United States a treaty of peace—peace with honor, peace with the blessings of liberty to struggling peoples, East and West. [Applause.]”78 In Augusta, Georgia, McKinley commented that “We stood united before a foreign foe. We will stand united until every triumph of that war has been made permanent. [Applause.]”79 Yet, McKinley still avoided the specific issues that the treaty raised. Even at this late date, with the treaty’s provisions on the public record, his advocacy avoided the usual methods of deliberative rhetoric. These speeches obviously addressed the general public, and advocated policy positions, but did so in general, value-laden terms.

the third stage: justifying a policy After a brief hiatus, McKinley delivered a few speeches in February 1899. Thus began the third phase of his presidential speechmaking. At the Home

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Market Club in Boston on February 16, he brought up the peace treaty once more, but now any vague, value-laden speechmaking went to the background, and McKinley instead offered deliberative rhetoric. The Senate had ratified the treaty on February 6, so the rhetorical circumstances had changed. The president no longer needed to obtain ratification—which was now accomplished—but aimed to justify the treaty after the fact. During the earlier time when deliberation would have seemed most necessary, the president had kept himself just a bit above the fray. At this point, before an audience of nearly five thousand, he gave a specific justification for the annexation of the Philippine Islands.80 He remarked that there was no question of returning them to Spain, and that to transfer them to another nation would be to “shirk our own responsibility.” To grant them their independence would “leave them to the anarchy and chaos of no protectorate at all,” a policy that was “too shameful to be considered.” He repudiated the notion that the United States needed the “consent” of the Filipinos to free them from Spain. He criticized the Filipino independence movement, whose rebellion was “engaged in shooting down their rescuers.” Commenting on the difficulty of the decisions, McKinley complained that “the prophet of evil would do nothing.”81 In place of the arrogant rhetoric of Manifest Destiny, McKinley stressed moral obligations and relationships. This differed greatly from the speeches he delivered before ratification. The decision now made, McKinley explained and justified the reasoning behind it. Before ratification, McKinley relied on praise and assertions of general values; after ratification, he contended point by point with his opponents. Margaret Leech calls this speech “a landmark in McKinley’s utterances as President.” She finds in it “the familiar ring of moral dedication” but also finds it to be “direct and incisive.”82 Mel Laracey notes that McKinley gave a number of policy speeches about annexing the Philippines, beginning with this one.83 This is correct, although McKinley had been hinting at his support for the policy for months. In 1897, the United States was, at best, a minor regional power, of only marginal importance to the nations of Europe and Asia. By 1899, the United States was a major player on the world stage. McKinley’s rhetoric became part of the process by which this remarkable transformation occurred. Yet, as late as November 1900, shortly after his reelection, McKinley assured an audience at the Union League, a Republican society: “Be not disturbed; there is no danger from empire: there is no fear for the Republic.”84

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the fourth stage: advocating policies in buffalo In some ways, McKinley’s last speech, delivered in Buffalo, New York, on September 5, 1901, a day before an unbalanced anarchist shot him in a receiving line, exhibited more aspects of the rhetorical presidency than any of his earlier efforts. In this speech, he advocated the expansion of foreign trade, thus contradicting his entire career as a politician. He directly addressed the people for the purpose of influencing economic foreign policy. The occasion of this dramatic speech was the Pan-American Exposition. McKinley’s statue at the McKinley Monument in Canton, Ohio, depicts a scene from this speech, McKinley looking ahead, shoulders squared, eyes focused, a seemingly unneeded sheaf of papers held unexamined at his side. About two thousand words long, the speech may have occupied fifteen or twenty minutes, one of McKinley’s longer efforts. The United States had had strong isolationist tendencies for most of its history.85 McKinley’s life-long, pro-tariff position had cohered with that attitude. Thus, although much of this speech may sound like common sense to a modern politician, it was remarkable for its time. True to form, McKinley made the speech sound ceremonial. He praised the concept of expositions, “the timekeepers of progress.” He stressed the growth of new ideas. Consistent with the exposition’s international theme, McKinley discussed the “friendly rivalry” of nations, the importance of commerce, and the shrinking globe: “modern inventions have brought into close relations widely separated peoples.” Ships and trains enable “the world’s products” to be traded with increasing dynamism. This led McKinley to conclude that “isolation is no longer possible or desirable.”86 With this delicate stroke, McKinley moved from ceremony to substance. Continuing, he pointed out the instant communications of the SpanishAmerican War. Railroads spread across the world. Trade statistics revealed an “almost appalling” level of prosperity. Mentioning that production now exceeded demand, McKinley discussed the need for new markets. In a message that should have shocked his diehard supporters, McKinley hinted at a new trade policy “if perchance some of our tariffs are no longer needed for revenue or to encourage and protect our industries at home.” To build this trade, he continued, would require an enlarged American-flag merchant marine. Near his conclusion, continuing with the ceremonial theme that marked so much of his earlier rhetoric, he quoted an old verse, “Make it live beyond its short living,” and assured his audience that “The Good Work Will Go On.”87 Finally, McKinley reminded his audience that “our real

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eminence rests in the victories of peace, not those of war” and prayed to God for worldwide prosperity.

mckinley as harbinger of the rhetorical presidency Thus, in speeches whose gentle tone often seemed similar to his Thanksgiving Day proclamations, McKinley undertook to influence public opinion to favor his policies. While speaking in a manner that directly contradicted the attitudes of Manifest Destiny, McKinley became that doctrine’s greatest apostle. What about President McKinley’s reputation as a boring speaker? One might presume, at least provisionally, that anyone who rises to a high level in U.S. politics must possess some sort of rhetorical excellence. Yet, few presidents become president by speaking with surpassing eloquence, Garfield being, perhaps, an exception. Lincoln delivered his more eloquent speeches only after gaining election to the presidency. McKinley did not routinely soar to heights of brilliant rhetoric in the fashion of Lincoln, or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or other dramatic speakers, but he routinely spoke in ways that could affect ordinary people. Particularly fascinating is McKinley’s ability to turn his seemingly vague, outwardly pointless rhetoric into an almost irrefutable (because almost devoid of argument) advocacy of divisive policy. The defining quality of the rhetorical presidency is to bring policy issues directly to the people rather than to their elected representatives in Congress. Step by step, McKinley headed in this direction. His rhetoric evolved over his years in office. Early in his presidency, his speeches tended toward generalities, assertions of values, and appeals for national unity. He alluded to policies, if at all, only in elliptical, very indistinct terms. The Spanish-American War changed McKinley’s rhetoric as thoroughly as it changed the nation’s destiny. The war itself gave rise to very little presidential rhetoric. The president stayed in the White House, occasionally issuing official instructions through formal channels. After Spain surrendered, he found himself facing an unexpected problem: what to do with the newly acquired territory. One cannot avoid the seeming clash between McKinley’s aggressive policies and his reserved personal style.88 McKinley advocated his policies with a rhetoric that often seemed gentle, or even innocuous. This innocuous rhetoric, however, marked a significant advance in presidential discourse. Expecting a close vote on the Treaty of Paris, McKinley gave speeches

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that supported the values and attitudes that underlay an expansionist policy, advocating the policy itself only occasionally. His Home Market Club speech, which advocated policy directly, followed the Senate’s ratification vote and therefore cannot have influenced it. As a rhetorician, McKinley astutely but cagily edged the country toward a dramatic change in foreign policy, all the while keeping himself just above the tussle of political controversy. Another understanding of McKinley emerges from his rhetorical evolution—that the president was a skilled rhetor, a consummate politician who understood the ways of Congress, the public, and the human heart, one who could carefully make up his mind, and circumspectly manipulate events to work out as he intended. Astutely aware of the need to seem presidential, dignified, and above the fray, McKinley adroitly presented his case to the public in rhetoric whose outward guises were ceremonial, but which was crafted to establish the values that drove his policies. His hundreds of speeches covered the topics of his time in a way that did not usually seem argumentative, but which laid out the situation in a way that made McKinley’s policies seem inevitable. His successor, Theodore Roosevelt, may have employed the bully pulpit of the presidency to excellent effect, but in so doing he refined the techniques that McKinley had pioneered.

notes 1. Margaret Leech, In the Days of McKinley (New York: Harper and Row, 1959). 2. Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 219, 256–58. 3. Frederick Merk with Lois Bannister Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 24; Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1958), 43–71. 4. John Dobson, Reticent Expansionism: The Foreign Policy of William McKinley (Pittsburgh, Penn.: Duquesne University Press, 1988), 101. 5. Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 4. 6. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency, 61–66, 87. 7. “More Work, More Wages,” Canton Repository, September 13, 1896, 1. 8. “President McKinley’s Speech,” Wall Street Journal, July 13, 1900, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, The Wall Street Journal (1889–1987): 5. 9. Mel Laracey, Presidents and the People: The Partisan Story of Going Public (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002). 10. Grover Cleveland, “The President’s Message.” New York Times, December 7, 1887. ProQuest Historical Newspapers, The New York Times.

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11. Allan Nevins, Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1964), 379. 12. Grover Cleveland, “Fourth Annual Message, December 7, 1896,” in The State of the Union Messages of the Presidents, 1790–1966, ed. Fred L. Israel (New York: Chelsea House/ Robert Hector Publishers, 1966), 2:1829–32. 13. “Address at the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, Nashville, June 11, 1897,” in Speeches and Addresses of William McKinley from March 1, 1897 to May 30, 1900 (New York: Doubleday, 1900), 31. 14. Ibid., “Speech at Banquet of Ellicott Club, Buffalo, New York, August 24, 1897,” 39. 15. Ibid., “Speech at State Fair, Columbus, Ohio, September 3, 1897,” 44. 16. William McKinley, “Address to the People for Thanksgiving and Prayer,” July 6, 1898, The American Presidency Project (online), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws. 17. Compare the similar rhetorical approach of McKinley’s 1896 presidential campaign discussed in William D. Harpine, “Playing to the Press in McKinley’s Front Porch Campaign: The Early Weeks of a Nineteenth-Century Pseudo-Event,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30 (2000): 73–90. 18. Charles Emory Smith, “McKinley in the Cabinet Room,” Saturday Evening Post, October 11, 1902, 6–7. 19. Robert L. Ivie, “William McKinley: Advocate of Imperialism,” Western Speech 36 (1972): 16–18, 21–23. 20. Robert L. Ivie, “Presidential Motives for War,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 60 (1974): 342. 21. Kurt Ritter and James R. Andrews, The American Ideology: Reflections of the Revolution in American Rhetoric (Falls Church, Va.: Speech Communication Association, 1978), 76. 22. Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1980), 137. 23. Charles G. Dawes, A Journal of the McKinley Years, ed. Bascom N. Timmons (Chicago: Lakeside-R. R. Donnelley, 1950), 149. 24. Ibid., 162–63. 25. Dobson, Reticent Expansionism, 78. 26. David Healy, U.S. Expansionism: The Imperialist Urge in the 1890’s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 63; H. Wayne Morgan, America’s Road to Empire: The War with Spain and Overseas Expansion (New York: Wiley, 1965), 75; John L. Offner, An Unwanted War: The Diplomacy of the United States and Spain over Cuba, 1895–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 216–17. 27. Charles Emory Smith, “McKinley in the Cabinet Room,” Saturday Evening Post, October 11, 1902, 6, 8. 28. Offner, An Unwanted War, 235. 29. Russell Hastings to William McKinley, December 8, 1898, MS, William McKinley Papers, Library of Congress, Series 1, Reel 5. 30. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley, 134. 31. William R. Day to William McKinley, TS of a telegram transcribed from cipher, William McKinley Papers, Library of Congress, Series 1, Reel 5. 32. Jacob Gould Schurman, Philippine Affairs: A Retrospect and Outlook, an Address by Jacob Gould Schurman (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902), 2. 33. Thoroughly discussed in George J. A. O’Toole, The Spanish War (New York: Norton, 1984); also, Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 323.

emergence of the modern rhetorical presidency: william mckinley  34. Ritter and Andrews, The American Ideology, 77–78. 35. William Jennings Bryan, Bryan on Imperialism (New York: Arno, 1900/1970), 3–4. 36. Ibid., 29–45. 37. W. Bourke Cockran, “Evils of a Standing Army, Extract from a Speech at the Students’ Lecture Association of the University of Michigan, February 4, 1899,” Robert I. Fulton and Thomas C. Trueblood, comps., Patriotic Eloquence Relating to the Spanish-American War and Its Issues (New York: Scribner’s, 1903), 67. 38. “Vest Against Expansion,” New York Times, December 13, 1898. 39. “Champ Clark Speaks,” Washington Post, February 6, 1900. 40. Bryan, Bryan on Imperialism, 16; see also Paolo E. Coletta, William Jennings Bryan I: Political Evangelist, 1860–1908 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 234. 41. Brian P. Damiani, Advocates of Empire: William McKinley, the Senate, and American Expansion 1898–1899 (New York: Garland, 1987), 34. 42. Ibid., 8 43. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley, 2. 44. Charles S. Olcott, The Life of William McKinley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916), 2:346. 45. Morgan, America’s Road to Empire, 91; Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley, 135–36. 46. Damiani, Advocates of Empire, 6, 70–71. 47. Julius W. Pratt, Expansionists of 1898: The Acquisition of Hawaii and the Spanish Islands (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1959), 337–38. 48. “The Paris Negotiations,” New York Times, October 12, 1898, 3. 49. Speeches and Addresses, “Speech at Camp Wikoff, Montauk Point, New York, September 3, 1898, with Introductory Remarks by Major-General Joseph Wheeler, U.S. V., Commanding Fifth Army-Corps,” 80–82. 50. Albert Beveridge, “American Empire: The March of the Flag (abridged),”American Rhetorical Discourse, ed. Ronald F. Reid and James F. Klumpp (Long Grove, Ill: Waveland Press, 2005), 675, 677. 51. Morgan, America’s Road to Empire, 91; “George D. Saxton Buried,” New York Times, October 11, 1898, 1; “President Starts for Omaha,” New York Times, October 11, 1898, 1; “The President’s Trip to Omaha,” New York Times, October 10, 1898, 1. 52. Speeches and Addresses, “Remarks at De Kalb, Illinois, October 11, 1898,” 84. 53. Ibid., “Speech at Clinton, Iowa, October 11, 1898,” 85–86. 54. “The President at Omaha,” New York Times, October 13, 1898, 6; Speeches and Addresses, “Speech at Cedar Rapids, Iowa, October 11, 1898,” 86–89. 55. Speeches and Addresses, “Speech at Belle Plaine, Iowa, October 11, 1898,” 89–90; see also Ivan Musicant, Empire by Default: The Spanish-American War and the Dawn of the American Century (New York: Holt/Wood, 1998), 385, 459, about McKinley’s examples. 56. Speeches and Addresses, “Speech at Tama, Iowa, October 11, 1898,” 90–91. 57. Ibid., “Speech at Ames Iowa, October 11, 1898,” 93–94. 58. Ibid., “Speech at Carroll, Iowa, October 11, 1898,” 96. 59. Ibid., “Speech at Denison, Iowa, October 11, 1898,” 97–98. 60. “Patriotism: It Was Breathed in Every Word He Uttered,” Summit County (Ohio) Beacon, October 13, 1898; “Mr. M’Kinley on the War,” New York Times, October 13, 1898. 61. Speeches and Addresses, “Address at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition at Omaha, Nebraska, October 12, 1898,” 101–102. 62. Ibid., 105; cf. “Patriotism.”

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63. Ibid., “Speech at Glenwood, Iowa, October 13, 1898,” 107–108; “Back to Washington,” Washington Post, October 14, 1898. 64. Ibid., “Speech at Red Oak, Iowa, October 13, 1898,” 109–10. 65. Ibid., “Speech in the Coliseum, St. Louis, Missouri, October 14, 1898,” 119–22. 66. Ibid., “Remarks at Hastings, Iowa, October 13, 1898,” 109. 67. “The President at Omaha,” New York Times, October 12, 1898. 68. Speeches and Addresses, “Speech at Columbus, Ohio, October 21, 1898,” 151–53. 69. “Congress Is Divided,” New York Times, November 9, 1898. 70. “McKinley Is in High Favor with the Georgia People,” Akron Beacon Journal, December 5, 1898. 71. Speeches and Addresses, “Speech at the Auditorium, Atlanta, Georgia, December 15, 1898,” 159–64. 72. Ibid., 161 73. Ibid., 161, 164. 74. “McKinley Is in High Favor,” 1, 3. 75. “That Confederate Badge” Cleveland Plain Dealer, December 7, 1898, William McKinley Papers, Library of Congress, Series 1, Reel 5; William McKinley to Holden, December 29, 1898, TS, William McKinley Papers, Library of Congress, Series 1, Reel 5. 76. William R. Day to McKinley, Dec. 2, 1898, TS, William McKinley Papers, Library of Congress, Series, 1 Reel 5. 77. State of the Union Messages of the Presidents, “Third Annual Message, December 5, 1899,” 2:1958. 78. Speeches and Addresses, “Speech at Macon, Georgia, December 19, 1898,” 178–80. 79. Speeches and Addresses, “Speech at Augusta, Georgia, December 19, 1898,” 182. 80. Figures from “Boston Preparing Big Banquet,” Washington Post, February 3, 1899. 81. Speeches and Addresses, “Speech at Dinner of the Home Market Club, Boston, February 16, 1899,” 187–89. 82. Leech, In the Days of McKinley, 362. 83. Laracey, Presidents and the People, 134–35. 84. “The President on Election’s Results,” New York Times, November 25, 1900, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, The New York Times, 1851–2001. 85. James M. McCormick, American Foreign Policy and American Values (Itasca, Ill.: F. E. Peacock Publishers), 1985, 6. 86. “The Last Speech of William McKinley, Buffalo, New York, September 5, 1901,” at The American Experience, America 1900, The Film & More, pbs.org. 87. Ibid. 88. John Dobson, Reticent Expansionism: The Foreign Policy of William McKinley (Pittsburgh, Penn.: Duquesne University Press, 1988), 1.

Afterword: Questioning the Rhetorical Presidency Construct martin j. medhurst

Have we learned anything from the study of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury presidencies that changes our understanding of the rhetorical presidency as set forth by Jeffrey Tulis? I believe we have. First, from a constitutional perspective, we have learned that there is a difference between how the Founders envisioned the functioning of the presidential office and how that office did, in fact, function over the course of its first 112 years. Indeed, we have learned that even among the Founders themselves, there was not one, monolithic, and universally agreed upon perspective concerning the presidential office. As Mel Laracey has shown, Federalists and Anti-Federalists tended to have different ideas about the presidency, and those differing ideas led to substantially different views about presidential communication. As influential as the Federalist voices were, theirs should not be the only voices counted as representing the “Founders.” A broader understanding of who the Founders were and how their positions on presidential rhetoric differed yields a more complex—and I would argue a far more interesting—mosaic of early American opinion. Second, we are reminded that with regard to presidential communication to the general public, the Constitution is silent. Tulis is surely right that the political culture of the late-eighteenth-century United States did not encourage much direct communication between the presidency and the public. Yet we cannot make a normative practice into a constitutional design.

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The Constitution, itself, is a rhetorical document, subject to the interpretations and judgments of those who would place themselves under its authority. No one respected that authority more than George Washington. Yet, as Stephen E. Lucas has shown, Washington did not hesitate to perform the presidency in front of the public, sometimes through speech, or ritual, or pageantry, or political tours, or written messages distributed through newspapers. Washington’s was a thoroughly rhetorical presidency, although in ways that were substantially different from the rhetorical presidency of the twentieth century. Third, we have learned that the term “rhetorical” must be understood in broader and more complex ways than public speech alone. Again, Tulis is right when he observes that most of the nineteenth-century presidents eschewed giving public speeches about matters of policy. However, he is wrong to equate the absence of speech with the absence of rhetoric. As these chapters have shown, the practice of presidential rhetoric was ubiquitous in the nineteenth century despite the fact that public speeches were used quite sparingly. Other forms of rhetoric including the presidential newspaper, public tours, campaign pamphlets, veto messages, ceremonies and rituals, front porch appearances, and public letters helped presidents to communicate their positions and policies to the general public. Tulis is right that forms do matter, but it is not clear to me that they matter in precisely the ways that he seems to assume. Different forms do have different effects, but history has shown that any number of rhetorical forms can be used to energize the public—or to invite deliberation. Different presidents have used different forms of rhetoric, but all used rhetoric of one sort or another, on one occasion or another. Even the “non-rhetorical” presidency of Grover Cleveland resorted to rhetoric occasionally. Fourth, we have learned that the “public” takes many forms and serves various functions with respect to the rhetorical presidency. Tulis is surely right that many of the Founders, especially Hamilton and Madison, were suspicious of the demos. They tended to equate the people with a mob and appeals to the public with demagoguery. However, if this book has proven anything, it is that the nineteenth-century presidents seldom conceived of or treated the people as a mob and seldom resorted to demagogic appeals. Terms such as “reasonable,” “literate,” “clear,” “noble,” and “value-laden” recur throughout these chapters. Lincoln was not the only nineteenth-century president to appeal to the “better angels of our nature.” Just as these presidents used rhetoric in different ways, so they also thought about the public in different ways, sometimes to their benefit, sometimes to their detriment.

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As the rhetorical presidency evolved so, too, did the rhetorical public. Who can doubt that women and African Americans, for example, constituted publics for nineteenth-century presidents? Even without enfranchisement, many of the participants in the abolitionist, women’s rights, temperance, and labor movements affected the ways in which presidents thought, spoke, and wrote about national policy. From the standpoint of the rhetorical presidency, a public exists from the moment a group’s presence impinges upon the thought processes (and subsequent policy recommendations) of a chief executive. Fifth, just as our theory of rhetorical publics must be expanded so, too, must our theory of presidential intent. According to Tulis, modern presidents use rhetoric because they intend to go over the heads of Congress and enlist the general public as an ally in forcing legislative action. While presidents certainly have done that on occasion (though not as often as Tulis seems to presume), what we find in the nineteenth-century presidency is an array of purposes and uses for presidential rhetoric. Perhaps the most important lesson from these chapters is how presidents used the epideictic genre to achieve deliberative purposes. From Washington’s tours to McKinley’s “value-laden” speeches on empire, presidents have realized that the route to policy adoption often runs directly through ritual, ceremony, and the embodied performance of leadership. Sometimes the simple act of being at a particular place, in a particular hour, in front of a specific audience is, itself, a rhetorical performance. In such cases, no “speech” is necessary to achieve the president’s rhetorical purpose. Tulis tends to presume that only direct, spoken appeals for adherence to policy proposals count as enactments of the rhetorical presidency. This is a misconception. More often than not, presidents achieve their purposes through indirect means, by persuading the public to accept certain definitions, meanings, and values, and then associating their policies with those larger value constructs. Sixth, we need to expand our conception of the rhetorical presidency from a logos-centered construct featuring policy arguments to an ethoscentered construct built on the ability to display character and to embody a national ethos. For many of the Founders, the problem with rhetorical appeals centered on the fear of pathos-centered discourse—appeals to the emotions that could excite the mob and lead to mobocracy. For Tulis and other critics of the rhetorical presidency, the twentieth-century problem is a misdirection of logos-centered appeals to an audience not constitutionally empowered (and presumably not able) to consider such argument and reasoning. Left out of both formulations is the idea of presidential ethos

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as an embodiment of national character and self-understanding. No study of Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, or Lincoln—rhetorical presidents all— could account for their legislative successes absent their appeal from character. Indeed, the fact that many of the presidents studied in this volume were considered failures both in their own times and today is explained, in part, by their inability to project personal and/or national character. While character alone cannot carry a policy program, no substantial policy initiative is likely to succeed absent appeals based on ethos. Seventh, the theory of the rhetorical presidency must more clearly distinguish the act of judgment (both political and rhetorical) from the act of audience engagement through argumentation. As several chapters in this volume demonstrate, no amount of argument, whether directed to the public or the Congress, can compensate for bad political judgment. Sound judgment does not always win the day, but poor judgment almost always leads to rhetorical disaster, as the cases of Pierce, Buchanan, and Johnson amply demonstrate. Tulis and other critics of the rhetorical presidency are concerned with the public’s supposed lack of judgment and its inability to deliberate about policy proposals. But if the history of the presidency has taught us anything, it is that the electorate is often at the mercy of the executive’s judgment, and that executive judgment has often been badly mistaken. There is a tendency to blame rhetoric and its public practice for matters that are, initially at least, deliberative topics for the executive. The inventional processes that lead to the practice of the rhetorical presidency need far more attention than they have heretofore received. Indeed, the ways in which presidents have used rhetoric as an instrument for determining judgment and decision making— Grant’s use of the drafting process to clarify his stance on a bill that he initially thought he approved is a case in point—is an area ripe for investigation. Finally, we must consider rhetorical effect. While Tulis and his associates are more concerned with the constitutional powers of the office and how they may be distorted by the rise of the rhetorical presidency, some scholars of rhetoric and the presidency are more concerned with its instrumental uses. They want to know whether rhetoric works to achieve certain identifiable, perhaps even quantifiable, effects. It is a fair question but one that is often cast in such a way as to predetermine the answer. Scholars looking for a one-to-one correlation between presidential messages and popular or congressional actions are likely to be disappointed. As George C. Edwards III, among others, has pointed out, one can seldom find a direct correlation between presidential rhetoric and change in public opinion. Such change, if it occurs at all, is “at the margins.”1 If presidential rhetoric doesn’t change

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public opinion, then why worry about a rhetorical presidency at all? There are several answers to this question, but we must start with the obvious: there are limits to the powers of rhetoric—all rhetoric. Sometimes the situation is so perilous, the exigencies so complex, the constraints so ubiquitous that it is difficult to imagine a rhetoric that could succeed, if by success one means to achieve a legislative or policy solution to a problem. But framing the issue in this way often misses the point, for often presidents are not trying to achieve a direct or immediate legislative solution. Sometimes they are preparing the ground, or floating a trail balloon, or reinforcing a needed value, or demonstrating character, or building support for one part of a larger whole. Merely because rhetorical practice does not lead to immediate change in belief or opinion does not mean that the rhetoric has failed. One first has to know what the president’s intent was before one can judge the success or failure of his effort. Furthermore, we must always keep in mind that the constitutive function of presidential rhetoric is equally as important as its instrumental function. Who rhetoric invites us to be, what kind of people we become by assenting to presidential discourse, and what kind of country we constitute by the way we debate and deliberate in public are matters of equal import to whether a particular piece of legislation is passed or a specific policy implemented; indeed, they are often matters of greater import. While the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution were necessary and proper, the failure of the Reconstruction presidents and those who followed them to challenge public memory and to create a new national consciousness, a new American identity on matters of race and culture, is of greater import than whether any one piece of legislation passed. It is through rhetoric that we constitute our world. Judging how presidents have invited us to think and act is a far more complex process than measuring public opinion at any given moment in time. It involves more than a judgment of effect; it involves a judgment of character, and morality, and ethics, and cultural norms. In short, it involves interpretation.2 The precise “effect” any presidential discourse has on us is always a matter of debate, and will remain so. The rhetorical presidency has made all of us responsible for the conduct of our government. We can no longer blame the president or those damned politicians for all our problems. The public is now part of U.S. democracy, a far greater part than in the nineteenth century. Although the temptation is always to focus on the president or the presidential office, perhaps the next step in advancing our theory of the rhetorical presidency is to take more seriously our responsibilities as a rhetorical audience. How are we rhetorically constituting ourselves as a “public”? What values are we enacting in our

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political behaviors? What messages have we constructed? What audiences have we reached? What kind of democracy do we want? Tulis and his associates have been accused of longing for a return to the prerhetorical presidency. But as this volume has demonstrated, there is no such place. Rhetoric and politics are inseparable in a democratic republic. The rhetorical presidency is here to stay. Presidential rhetors will be only as good as their publics demand them to be, and as their innate understanding and abilities will allow. The rhetorical presidency can be a source of strength, but only if the audience performs its role.

notes 1. See George C. Edwards III, At the Margins: Presidential Leadership of Congress (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989); George C. Edwards III, On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003). 2. On the role of interpretation in rhetorical analysis of presidential discourse, see Martin J. Medhurst, “Rhetorical Leadership and the Presidency: A Situational Taxonomy,” in The Values of Presidential Leadership, ed., Terry L. Price and J. Thomas Wren (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 59–84; Martin J. Medhurst, “The Ways of Rhetoric,” in Beyond the Rhetorical Presidency, ed. Martin J. Medhurst (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996), 218–26.



Contributors Stephen Howard Browne is Professor of Rhetorical Studies in the Department of Communication Arts & Sciences at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Jefferson’s Call for Nationhood: The First Inaugural Address, Angelina Grimke: Rhetoric, Identity, and the Radical Imagination, and Edmund Burke and the Discourse of Virtue. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is coauthor with Kathleen Hall Jamieson of Presidents Creating the Presidency: Deeds Done in Words. A leading scholar of women’s public discourse, she is the author of the two-volume work Man Cannot Speak for Her. Her articles and reviews have appeared in many of the leading disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals. George R. Goethals holds the E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Professorship in Leadership Studies at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond. A social psychologist, Goethals previously served as founding chair of the program in leadership studies at Williams College, and as Provost of the College. He is the author or coauthor of more than one hundred articles or chapters and the coeditor of the four-volume Encyclopedia of Leadership. William D. Harpine is Professor and Chair of Communications at the University of South Carolina, Aiken. He is the author of From the Front Porch to the Front Page: McKinley and Bryan in the 1896 Presidential Campaign. His research has appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Philosophy and Rhetoric, and Advances in the History of Rhetoric. Stephen John Hartnett is Associate Professor and Chair of Communication at the University of Colorado, Denver. His most recent books are Globalization and Empire and Incarceration Nation. He is currently working on the two-volume Executing Democracy: Capital Punishment & the Making of America.

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contributors

Mel Laracey is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas, San Antonio. He holds the J.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, and an M.P.A. from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is the author of Presidents and the People: The Partisan Story of Going Public. Michael Leff is Professor and Chair in the Department of Communication at the University of Memphis. His research and teaching interests include the history of rhetoric, rhetorical criticism, and argumentation. He has published widely on these subjects, has won a number of awards for his scholarship, and has been named a Distinguished Scholar by the National Communication Association and the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. Stephen E. Lucas is Professor of Communication Arts and Evjue-Bascom Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin. The author of numerous books and articles on American political discourse, he received the National Communication Association’s Golden Anniversary Book Award for Portents of Rebellion: Rhetoric and Revolution in Philadelphia, 1765–1776, as well as the association’s Golden Anniversary Monograph Award. Martin J. Medhurst is Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Communication, and Professor of Political Science, at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He is the author or editor of thirteen books, including Beyond the Rhetorical Presidency, The Rhetorical Presidency of George H. W. Bush, and The Prospect of Presidential Rhetoric. In 2005, he was named a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association. Amy R. Slagell is Associate Professor of Speech Communication and head of the Speech Communication program in the Department of English at Iowa State University. Her work centers on nineteenth-century American public address, with a focus on women’s and presidential discourse. She is the coeditor of “Let Something Good Be Said”: Collected Speeches and Writings of Frances E. Willard.

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Robert E. Terrill is Associate Professor of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, where he teaches courses in rhetorical history and criticism. His work has appeared in leading journals, including The Quarterly Journal of Speech and Rhetoric & Public Affairs. He is the author of Malcolm X: Inventing Radical Judgment and coauthor of Reading Rhetorical Texts. Jeffrey K. Tulis is Associate Professor of Government at the University of Texas. He is the author of The Rhetorical Presidency and of a recent retrospective essay in The Rhetorical Presidency at 20, a special issue of Critical Review published in 2007. His current projects include a book on contemporary forms of constitutional abdication, titled The Politics of Deference, and another book on Legacies of Loss in American Politics (with Nicole Mellow). Kirt H. Wilson is a McKnight Presidential Fellow and Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota. A critic and theorist of U.S. public discourse, he focuses his research on mid- to late-nineteenth-century political rhetoric and African American civil rights struggles. He has won several national awards, including two honors from the National Communication Association for his book Reconstruction’s Desegregation Debate. Susan Zaeske is Professor of Rhetoric in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Author of Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women’s Political Identity, her research centers on rhetoric, history, gender, race, and political culture. She has received the National Communication Association’s Winans-Wichelns Award, Golden Anniversary Monograph Award, Karl Wallace Award, and the Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award. David Zarefsky is the Owen L. Coon Professor of Argumentation and Debate, and Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. Among his principal research interests is the controversy over slavery and territorial expansion in the years before the Civil War. He is a former president of the National Communication Association and the Rhetoric Society of America and is the author of several books, including Lincoln, Douglas, and Slavery: In the Crucible of Public Debate.



Index Note: Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Page numbers in bold refer to the chapter devoted to the topic. Abbott, Philip, 19 abolitionism and annexation of Texas, 73, 74 and Fugitive Slave Law, 109 and gag rule, 125 and Kansas-Nebraska crisis, 139 opponents of, 48, 110 and Pierce, 108, 112, 116, 117–18, 141–42, 143–44, 155 and Van Buren, 48–51 of women, 47, 48, 61n23 See also slavery The Abolitionists Attack! Abolitionists Against General Pierce, 119 Abraham Lincoln: Public Speaker (Braden), 4 Abraham Lincoln the Orator (Einhorn), 4 Abzug, Robert, 199 Adams, John, 38, 39, 86, 87 Adams, John Quincy and civil service appointments, 236 and Native Americans, 52 and Polk, 86, 101, 104n41 and right to petition, 49 and Texas, 70, 71 “Address to the Citizens of Concord” (Emerson), 108–9 African Americans as audience of presidential rhetoric, 258, 261, 331 and civil rights, 225–30, 249–50, 269, 271, 274, 276–77, 278–79, 281, 282–84

and Grant, 215, 225–30, 239 and Harrison, 269–70, 275–77, 278–80, 281, 282–84, 285 and Hayes, 250–51, 252–53, 262–63, 265n24 and Jim Crow laws, 228, 263, 285 and public memory of Civil War, 272–73, 274 See also slavery Alabama affair, 230–32 Alien and Sedition Acts, 134 Altgeld, John P., 295, 297–302, 303, 304 Alton [Illinois] Telegraph & Democratic Review, 111 American Anti-Slavery Society, 110 American Party, 139–40, 149, 154–55, 163n46, 164n46 American Presidents: Life Portraits, 166 The American Presidents Ranked by Performance (Faber and Faber), 166 American Railway Union, 295–98 American System, 85 Anderson, Robert, 187 Andrews, James R., 312 Andrews, Stephen Pearl, 71 annexation of territories, 176 annual messages to Congress about, 38, 39 of Buchanan, 168, 169, 175, 177–78, 181, 182, 183, 184–88 of Cleveland, 292, 309 of Grant, 222, 227, 231, 233, 236–37 of Harrison, 275–76, 277, 279 of Jackson, 44 of Jefferson, 38 of Pierce, 108, 126–27, 140–43, 150–57

 annual messages to Congress (Cont.) of Polk, 89–90, 91, 93, 95, 97 of Tyler, 69–70, 71, 72, 78 of Van Buren, 54 of Wilson, 38, 39 Anti-Federalists, 23–24, 29, 32–33, 329 Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (Grimké), 51 Appleby, Joyce, 23 Aristotle, 3, 293 Arthur, Chester A., 237, 284 Articles of Confederation, 32, 187 Asen, Robert, 46 asylums for the insane, 129–35 Atchison, David, 138, 146 The Atlantic Monthly, 194, 203, 209, 210 Auchampaugh, Philip G., 172, 174, 175 audiences, 2–3, 330–31, 332, 333–34. See also citizenry Aune, James Arnt, 85 Babcock, Orville, 235 Bailyn, Bernard, 5 Bancroft, George, 88, 90 Bangor Jeffersonian, 200 Bank of the United States, 66–67 Barnburners, 116 Battle of Gettysburg, 272 Battle of Little Big Horn, 234 Beardsley, Samuel, 48 Beecher, Catharine, 53 Belknap, William, 236 Bellah, Robert, 280 Bennett, James Gordon, 90, 147–48 Benton, Thomas Hart, 45, 100, 137 Bergeron, Paul H., 78, 91 Berrien, John M., 100 Berry, Mildred Freburg, 5 Berwanger, Eugene, 138, 142 Bethune, George, 147 The Betrayal of the Negro (Logan), 246 Beveridge, Albert J., 315 Biddle, Nicholas, 101 Bigler, William, 153 Birkner, Michael J., 166

index Birney, James G., 77–78, 88 Black, Edwin, 5, 171, 204 Black, Jeremiah, 188 Black Republicans, 156 Blaine, James G., 228, 268 Blair, Francis P., 21, 284 Blair, Henry W., 275 Blair Education Bill, 275, 279, 284 Bland, Richard P., 92, 304 Blight, David, 271, 272 Boller, Paul, 121 Book, Joseph, 270 Border Ruffians, 138–39, 140, 151 Boston Kansas Relief Committee, 138 boycotts, 296 Braden, Waldo W., 4, 271 Branch, Lawrence, 157 Brands, H. W., 5 Brazil, 282 Breckinridge, John C., 179, 183, 184 Brigham, Amariah, 129 Bristow, Benjamin, 235 Britain and the Alabama affair, 230–32 British rhetorical practice, 293 and Grant, 230–32 and Mexico, 96 and Oregon, 88, 90, 92, 95 and slavery, 71–72 and Texas, 71–72, 74–75, 76 and Webster-Ashburton Treaty, 69 Brodsky, Alyn, 290 Brooks, Preston, 145–47, 151 Brouwer, Daniel, 46 Brown, Aaron Vail, 72 Brown, Albert, 155–56 Brown, John, 145, 183 Brown, Thomas, 135 Browne, Stephen Howard, 4, 5, 10–11, 194–212 Bruce, Dickson, 205 Bryan, William Jennings, 304, 313, 314 Bryant, William Cullen, 145, 149 Buchanan, James M., 10, 166–93

index Buchanan, James M. (Cont.) annual messages to Congress, 168, 169, 175, 177–78, 181, 182, 183, 184–88 and detachment, 177–79 and election of 1852, 116, 121 and election of 1856, 148–49, 150, 154 and elections, regard for, 179–81, 185–88, 189 and family metaphors, 181–84 and Harper’s editorial cartoon, 141 and nature, 175–76 and Polk, 96, 100 and presidential newspaper, 22 regard for the Union, 171–75 and rhetorical assessments, 168–70 rhetorical practices, 20 and veto power, 104n58 Buchanan Dying (Updike play), 175 bully pulpit, 269, 307, 325 Bunting, Josiah, 214, 219 Burleigh, Charles, 110 Burr, Aaron, 21 Bush, George W., 238, 253, 263 Butler, Andrew, 146, 156 Butler, Benjamin, 26 Butler, David, 226 Calhoun, Charles, 269, 280, 286n7 Calhoun, John C. and abolitionism, 48 and annexation of Texas, 75, 79 death of, 122 and Polk, 92, 98 California and Mexican War, 97 and Polk, 84, 85, 88, 99–100 Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, 2, 4, 9–10, 83–105 capitalism and Harrison, 277, 278, 281, 282, 284 in Missouri, 137–38 and reform movement, 128–29 Carlson, Oliver, 147

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Carpenter, John, 214, 215 carpetbaggers, 248 Carwardine, Richard J., 46, 57 Cass, Lewis, 115, 116, 121, 146, 157–58 Ceaser, James, 1, 2 Central Illinois Kansas Committee, 138 ceremonial speaking of Harrison, 280–81, 282, 283 of McKinley, 310, 314–15, 323 and policy rhetoric, 3 Chandler, Zachariah, 157 Chase, Lucien Bonaparte, 100, 156 checks and balances, 292. See also separation of powers Cherokees, 52–57 Chestnut, James, 184 Chicago Tribune, 204 Child, Lydia Maria, 52–53 Chinese immigrants, 274 Cicero, 293 citizenry Founders’ distrust in, 45, 330 Jackson’s confidence in, 44 Johnson’s invocation of, 196, 197, 206 judgment of, 332 and representative democracy, 24 role in democracy, 333–34 civil disobedience, 109 civil rights and Grant, 225–30 and Harrison, 269, 271, 274, 276–77, 278–79, 281, 282–83 and Hayes, 263 Civil Rights Act of 1866, 273 Civil Rights Act of 1875, 273 Civil Rights Cases, 271 civil service and civil service reform, 234–38, 239, 247, 259, 264n8, 267 Civil War African American contributions to, 225, 250 and Buchanan, 167 and civil service, 236 debt from, 221–22

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index

Civil War (Cont.) and Grant, 218–19, 220, 221, 225, 230–31 and Harrison, 270, 271, 279, 280–81, 283 and Hayes, 244, 253, 257 and Johnson, 202 and pacification of the South, 247 and Pierce, 120, 135, 139, 148, 156–57 and Polk, 84, 102, 104n64 public memory of, 271–74, 284, 285–86, 333 and sacking of Lawrence, 145 and surrender of Lee, 218–19, 239–40 Clark, Champ, 313–14 class resentment, 202, 203, 210 Clay, Henry and annexation of Texas, 75, 77–78 and Bank of the United States, 66 death of, 122 and election of 1844, 88, 111 and Everett, 72 moderation of, 118 and Polk, 83, 87 and Tyler, 65, 67, 68 Cleveland, Grover, 12, 289–306 annual messages to Congress, 292, 309 character portraits of, 289–91 and civil rights, 284 dispute with Altgeld, 298–302 and election of 1892, 268 and populist rhetoric, 302–5 and the Pullman strike, 295–98 and the rhetorical presidency, 291–95, 330 and types of rhetoric, 305–6n12 Cleveland Plain Dealer, 195, 321 Clinton, William Jefferson, 89 Cockran, W. Bourke, 313 Coleman, Ann, 172–75 Coleman, Robert, 172–74 Collamer, Jacob, 153, 154

collective action, 295–98 collective rights, 303–5 Commager, Henry Steele, 290 “Committee of Notification,” 177 communications, 26, 46 Compromise of 1850 and California, 136 and Fugitive Slave Law, 136 and Pierce, 108, 112, 116 reactions to, 111, 144 compromise of 1877, 245–46, 260 Confidence-Man (Melville), 134 Congressional Globe, 153, 156, 196 Constitutional Government (Wilson), 27 constitutional parameters of the presidency and Harrison, 285 influence of, 25–26, 31–32 and policy rhetoric, 30 and the rhetorical presidency con- struct, 1, 329–30 and Tulis’s theory, 6, 39–40 and Washington, 39–40 See also U.S. Constitution Constitutional Treasury, 88, 91 Coolidge, Calvin, 36 Cooper, William J., 63–64 copperheads, 199 Corbin, Abel, 235 Cornell, Saul, 23 corruption, 123–24, 125, 192n48 Covode, John, 192n48 Cox, Jacob, 236 Cramer, John, 48 Credit Mobilier, 235 Crockett, Davy, 57–58 C-SPAN, 166 Cuba, 122, 227–28, 232, 309, 311, 312 Custer, George A., 234 Daily Madisonian, 68 Damiani, Brian P., 314 Davis, Jefferson, 122, 151 Dawes, Charles, 312 Day, William R., 313, 321 Debs, Eugene, 295, 297, 303

index Deeds Done in Words (Campbell and Jamieson), 4 defining presidential rhetoric, 2–3, 8, 20, 330, 331 deliberative rhetoric, 293–94, 302–3 demagoguery, 18–19, 45, 195, 208–9, 292, 330 democracy, 25, 333–34 Democratic Review, 121 Democrats and annexation of Texas, 73, 75, 77–78 and Buchanan, 179, 183, 184, 188 and election of 1852, 115–16, 120–22 and election of 1856, 149 and election of 1876, 246 and Fugitive Slave Law, 149 and Harrison, 270, 278 and Hayes, 249, 252, 255, 263 and Indian policy, 53 and Johnson, 200 and Kansas-Nebraska Act, 136, 139, 140, 144, 149 and McKinley, 314 and Mexican War, 97 and Pierce, 107, 112, 113, 117–21, 123, 124–25, 142, 149 and Polk, 84, 87, 91–93, 97 and the Pullman strike, 295, 300 and Reconstruction, 249 and reformers, 51 and Revolution of 1840, 58 and rhetorical practices, 24–25 and Tyler, 68 and Van Buren, 45 and Victorian liberalism, 304 Dent, Julia, 216 De Santis, Vincent, 290 Dickinson College, 173 Discourse on Aborigines (Harrison), 57 District of Columbia, 249 Dix, Dorothea, 130–35 Dix, John Adams, 133 Dixon, Archibald, 134

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domesticity, 185–88 Donald, David Herbert, 5 Dorsey, Leroy G., 2 Douglas, Stephen A. and Buchanan, 171, 180–81 commemoration of, 194, 204, 208, 210 and election of 1852, 115–16, 121 and election of 1860, 184 and Harper’s editorial cartoon, 141 and Kansas-Nebraska Act, 135–36, 151, 182 and Lecompton constitution, 169 self-regard of, 208 and Sumner, 146 Douglass, Frederick, 110, 234 Dred Scott decision, 186–87, 313 Dubofsky, Melvyn, 303 education, 266n39, 274–75, 279, 284 Edwards, George C., III, 332 Edward VII, 193n79 effect of presidential rhetoric, 332–33 Einhorn, Lois J., 4 Eisenhower, Dwight, 214, 230 Election Commission, 245, 246 elections and African Americans, 250, 262–63 Buchanan’s regard for, 179–81, 185–88, 189 compromise of 1877, 245–46, 260 and federal oversight, 266n39 presidential election of 2000, 243, 245, 253 and voting, 179–81, 250, 278, 279, 281–82 See also under specific candidates Electoral College, 245 Electoral Commission, 254; see also Election Commission Ellis, Joseph J., 5 Ellis, Richard J., 2 emancipation, 252–53, 273 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 108–9, 110, 111–12, 118, 136



index

Emigration Aid Society of Northern Ohio, 138 Enforcement Act (1871), 273 engagement of audience, 332 evangelicalism, 46, 51, 57 Evans, John, 236 Evarts, Jeremiah, 53 Everett, Edward, 71–72 executive powers and Harrison, 279 and Hayes, 258–59, 266n39 and Pierce, 123–26, 131, 152 and Polk, 88–95, 97 expansionism, 95–97, 104n64, 122–23, 308, 310–14 extremes, age of, 106, 107, 112, 158 Faber, Charles, 166 Faber, Richard, 166 Fairfield, John, 48 family metaphors, 181–84 Farrell, James M., 5 federal authority, 295–302 Federal Elections Bill, 278–79, 281–82, 284 Federalist Papers, 18, 23 Federalists, 23–24, 29, 32–33, 173, 329 Federalist Society, 166 Federal Strike Commission, 296 Fessenden, William, 155 Fickle, James, 268, 269 Fifteenth Amendment, 249, 251, 273, 333 filibusters, 246 Fillmore, Millard, 115, 149, 154 Finney, Charles Grandison, 46 The First Settlers of New England (Child), 52 Fish, Hamilton, 230, 232–33 Fisk, James, 235 Florida, 98, 245 Foner, Eric, 155 Fordyce, James, 59–60n10 foreign policy, 171–72 foreign trade, 307, 323 forms and formalities, 31 forms of rhetoric, 29–33, 293

Foster, George, 129 Four in America (Stein), 217 Fourteenth Amendment, 249, 251, 273, 333 France, 96, 293 Frank, Thomas, 214 Franklin Pierce and His Abolitionist Allies (circular), 117–18 Freedman Bureau, 202 freedom of speech, 261 Freehling, William, 5, 111, 137 Free Press, 145 Free Soil Party, 116–18, 142, 143, 145 Free State movement, 138 Frémont, John C., 149, 154, 155 From the Front Porch to the Front Page: McKinley and Bryan in the 1896 Presidential Campaign (Harpine), 4 Fugitive Slave Law and Buchanan, 186, 188 and Butler, 156 and Compromise of 1850, 136 and Democrats, 149 and Pierce, 108, 118–19, 122 and states’ rights, 125 gag rule, 116, 125 Gamm, Gerald, 255 Gara, Larry, 113 Gardner, Howard, 219 Garfield, James, 224, 237, 280, 324 Garrison, William Lloyd, 51, 110, 120, 142 gender issues, 59–60n10, 172. See also women General Grant National Memorial (Grant’s Tomb), 220 General Manager’s Association (GMA), 296 Georgia, 52 Gerring, John, 24 Gienapp, William E., 142, 167, 168, 169 Gilmer, Thomas, 72, 73 Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, 130, 130 Godey’s Lady’s Book, 46 Goethals, George R., 11, 213–42

index Golden, Alan L., 4 Golden, James L., 4 Gorsuch, Edward, 110–11 Gould, Jay, 235 Gould, Lewis L., 5, 269, 312 Grady, Henry, 283 Grant, Ulysses S., 11, 213–42 and African Americans, 225–30, 239 annual messages to Congress, 222, 227, 231, 233, 236–37 assessment of presidency, 213–14, 215, 219–20 and civil service reform, 234–38, 239 and Civil War, 218–19, 239–40 and election of 1876, 214, 238 and fiscal policy, 221–25 foreign policy, 230–33 inaugural address, 220–21, 226, 233 intelligence, 217–19 and Johnson, 194 memoirs, 216–17, 218, 239 and Native Americans, 233–34, 239 overview of life, 215–17 personality, 217–19 and Reconstruction, 215, 248 and veto power, 223–24 Greeley, Horace, 115, 128 Green, Duff, 71 Grimké, Angelina, 51 Grimké, Sarah, 61n23 group rights, 303–5 Guam, 311, 312 Gunderson, Robert G., 4, 57, 107 Hale, John, 121, 132–33, 152–53 Halttunen, Karen, 129 Hamilton, Alexander, 32, 225, 330 Hamlin, Hannibal, 196 Hammond, James, 184 Hampton, Wade, 259, 261 Harper’s, 141, 194 Harper’s Ferry, 183 Harpine, William D., 4, 12–13, 307–28 Harrison, Benjamin, 11–12, 267–88



and African Americans, 269–70, 275–77, 278–80, 281, 282–84, 285 annual messages to Congress, 275–76, 277, 279 assessment of presidency, 267–69 election of, 238 inaugural address, 277, 281 oratorical abilities, 269 personality, 267–68 and political advocacy, 281–82 and public memory of Civil War, 270–74, 284, 285–86 and public ritual, 280, 282–83 and the Southern Question, 270, 274–80, 282 Harrison, William Henry, 57, 58, 63, 65, 88 Hart, Roderick P., 2, 4 Hartnett, Stephen John, 10, 72–73, 106–65 “Harvest Home” letter, 176, 177 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 120, 123, 158 Hayes, Rutherford B., 11, 243–66 annual messages to Congress, 262 assessment of presidency, 243 and civil service reform, 247, 264n8 and disputed election of 1876, 238, 243–44 and freedmen, 215 inaugural address, 251–54, 256 nomination acceptance speech, 247–51 speaking tours, 254–62 Herald of Freedom, 145 Hints Toward Reforms (Greeley), 128 History of Tennessee (Phelan), 85 Hofstadter, Richard, 44, 59n1 Holt, Michael, 121, 137, 142 Hoogenboom, Ari, 263 Hoover, Herbert, 36 House of Representatives. See U.S. Congress Hubley, Grace, 173 humor, 257–58 Illinois, 296–98, 299 Illinois Central Railroad, 134



index

immigration, 128–29, 137–38, 142 The Impending Crisis (Potter), 98 inaugural addresses, 37 of Buchanan, 183 of Cleveland, 289–90 of Grant, 220–21, 226, 233 of Harrison, 277, 281 of Hayes, 251–54, 256 of Johnson, 196–201 of Lincoln, 170–71 of Pierce, 108, 122–26 of Polk, 91 of Tyler, 66 of Van Buren, 49–50 of Washington, 38–39, 40 The Independent, 204 Indian Removal Bill, 52–53. See also Native Americans Indian Territory, 55–56 indigent population, 131–35 individualism, 304 industrial development, 282 Inflation Bill, 222–24 “An Inquiry On the Subject of Feminine Influence in the Life of our Fifteenth President” (Auchampaugh), 172 insane asylums, 129–35 instrumentalism, 170 Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 166 interstate commerce, 297 In the Days of McKinley (Leech), 307 Iroquois Confederacy, 233 Isocrates, 293 Ivie, Robert L., 312 Jackson, Andrew annual messages to Congress, 44 and citizenry, 44 and civil service appointments, 236 and Indian policy, 52, 53 and nullification, 187 and Pierce, 112 and Polk, 84, 87 and powers of the presidency, 123, 124

and presidential newspaper, 21, 28n4 rhetorical practices, 20 and status of the presidency, 59n1 and Texas, 70, 72, 73, 74 and Tyler, 63–64 and Van Buren, 47, 50, 51 James Buchanan and the Political Crisis of the 1850s (Birkner), 166 Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, 2, 4 Jarvis, Edward, 129 Jasinski, Jim, 174 Jefferson, Thomas and annual messages to Congress, 38 and Native Americans, 54 in political cartoon, 119, 119 and Polk, 86 and powers of the presidency, 123, 124 and presidential newspaper, 21 and press leaks, 28n4 rhetorical practices, 20 Jeffersonianism, 83, 85–88, 304 Jefferson’s Call for Nationhood (Browne), 4 Jenkins, William, 173 Jim Crow laws, 228, 263, 285 Johnson, Andrew, 10–11, 194–212 and the Alabama affair, 230 and Civil War debts, 221 demagoguery, 208–9, 211 and Douglas-commemoration tour, 194–95, 204, 208, 210 and Grant, 216, 225–26 and impeachment, 30, 195 oratorical abilities, 204–10 and Polk, 92 self-regard of, 201–4, 206, 207, 211 speaking tours, 22 “Swing Around the Circle” cam- paign, 202–3, 208 and Tulis’s theory, 18, 26, 36 vice-presidential inaugural address, 196–201 Johnson, Cave, 88, 89 Johnson, Samuel, 137 Jones, George, 156–57

index judgement in presidential rhetoric, 332 judicial branch, 178, 263, 302, 303–4 Judis, John, 243, 246, 263 justice, 252–53 Kansas and Brooks’s assault of Sumner, 145–47, 151 and Buchanan, 176, 177–79, 180–81, 182, 186 election fraud in, 138–39, 141, 143, 151 and the English Bill, 192n48 sacking of Lawrence, 145, 147 Kansas-Nebraska Act, 135–48, 150, 179, 180–81 Keegan, John, 217–18 Kentucky, 256–57 Kentucky Resolutions, 123 Kernell, Samuel, 2, 28n4 Kirkbride, Thomas, 129 Klein, Philip Shriver, 167, 169, 173, 176 Know-Nothings, 140, 149, 156, 163n46 Ku Klux Klan, 228, 281 labor disputes, 295–302 labor unions, 303–4 Lamar, Mirabeau B., 71 Lane, Harriet, 193n79 Laracey, Mel, 7, 18–27 on development of presidential rhetoric, 35–37, 329 on Lincoln, 33n2 on McKinley, 40 on presidents’ policy messages, 309 and Tulis’s theory, 2, 6, 29–33 on Washington, 41n7 law and order, 277–78, 279–80, 281, 284, 285 Lawrence, Kansas, 145, 147 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 106 Lecompton constitution, 176, 177–79, 180–81, 192n48 Lee, Robert E., 216, 218–19, 233, 239–40



Leech, Margaret, 307, 322 Leff, Michael, 5, 12, 289–306 legislative branch and process, 1, 27, 39. See also U.S. Congress Leuchtenburg, William E., 290 liberalism, Victorian, 303–5 Liberty Party, 77 Life of Franklin Pierce (Hawthorne), 120 Lincoln, Abraham Buchanan contrasted with, 171, 189 caution exercised, 20, 33n2 Cooper Union address, 264n8 and election of 1860, 184 and Hayes, 248, 256, 257 inaugural addresses, 170–71 and Johnson, 198–99, 200, 201–2 leadership of, 201–2, 204 “Lyceum Address,” 50 oratorical abilities, 206, 208, 324 and Polk, 97 rhetorical practices, 19–20, 22 scholarship on, 4, 5 and surrender of Lee, 218–19 and Van Buren, 50–51 Lincoln, Douglas and Slavery: In the Crucible of Public Debate (Zaresfky), 4 local government, 252 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 278 Logan, Rayford W., 246 “Log Cabin Campaign,” 57 Log-Cabin Campaign (Gunderson), 4 logos-centered presidential rhetoric, 331–32 Loguen, Jermain Wesley, 110, 112, 118, 136 Longacre, Edward, 214 Lost Cause, 271 Louisiana and African Americans, 229 and election of 1876, 245–46 and Hayes, 252, 263 and Reconstruction, 248 and slavery, 98 Louisiana Purchase, 72, 73, 136 Lowell, James Russell, 194, 201, 204 Lucas, Stephen E., 35–41 on audiences, 3



index

Lucas, Stephen E. (Cont.) on presidential behavior, 24 on Washington, 2, 5, 6–8, 330 Lundy, Benjamin, 70–71 lynchings, 263, 279–80, 281 Madison, James, 23, 28n4, 39, 187, 330 Madisonian, 21–22 magazines, 46 mail service, 297–98, 299 Manifest Destiny and McKinley, 308, 315, 319, 322, 324 and Pierce, 122, 123 and Polk, 83, 91, 95–97, 100 and role of the federal government, 158 and Tyler, 71, 77 Manila Bay attack, 312 Marcy, William, 116, 121, 136 Marsh, Caleb, 236 Marshall, Alice, 210 The Mask of Command (Keegan), 217–18 mass democracy, 44, 45–47 May, Robert E., 167 McClure’s Magazine, 301 McCormac, Eugene, 84–85 McCulloch, Hugh, 198 McDonald, Forrest, 5 McFeely, William S., 5, 215 McIver, Stuart B., 166 McKinley, William, 12–13, 307–28 assessment of presidency, 307, 311 ceremonial speaking, 310 and civil rights, 284 and civil service reform, 264n8 and expansionism, 310–14 and Harrison, 268 Home Market Club policy speech, 308, 322, 325 and Manifest Destiny, 308, 315, 319, 322, 324 rhetorical agenda, 314–15 rhetorical practices, 30, 34n5, 40–41 and Spanish-American War, 315–20, 321 speaking tours, 19, 22, 315–21

McKinley Tariff Act, 267, 268 McKitrick, Eric, 205, 207 McPherson, James M., 5, 214 Meade, George C., 218, 280–81 Medhurst, Martin J., 1–16, 37–38, 329–34 media, 26, 46, 259–60, 269, 300, 304. See also newspapers, presidential; specific publications Melville, Herman, 134 mental hygiene, 129 Messages and Papers of the Presidents (Richardson), 63, 89 Mexican War declaration of war, 91, 92 and Grant, 216 and Manifest Destiny, 308 and Pierce, 121 and Polk, 95, 96–97, 99 and slavery, 125 Mexico and annexation of Texas, 72, 74, 75, 76, 78, 90 and Polk, 102 and slavery, 98, 122 Milburn, John G., 289 military service, 257–58, 260 The Military Service of General Pierce (Boller), 121 Milton, A. P., 261 Missouri, 137–39, 151 Missouri Compromise, 98, 136–37, 173, 176 Modern Eloquence (Reed), 37–38 Monroe, James, 52 Monroe Doctrine, 90 Moore, John Bassett, 168 Morgan, Robert J., 69, 79 Morison, Samuel Eliot, 290 Nast, Thomas, 194 The Nation, 203, 209, 300 National Bank, 87, 101 National Intelligencer, 21, 28n4 Native Americans and Grant, 215, 220, 233–34, 239 and Harrison, 274

index and Polk, 95 and reform movement, 47 removal of, 52–57, 233 Nativists, 140, 142, 163n46 natural rights, 303–4 nature, 175–76 Nebraska, 136, 226 Neustadt, Richard, 19 Nevins, Allan on antebellum era, 5 on Buchanan, 167, 168, 177 on Cleveland, 289, 290, 300 on election of 1852, 115 on election of 1856, 150 on Pierce, 113, 122, 144, 153, 158 The New Haven Palladium, 224 New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum, 130, 130 Newman, Nathan, 213 New Mexico, 84, 85, 97, 99–100 New Orleans Republican, 72 The New Republic, 243, 246, 263 newspapers, presidential common reliance on, 7, 20–22, 31, 37, 330 and expectations of presidents, 25 and Tulis’s theory, 6 See also specific newspapers New-York Daily Times, 152 New York Evening Post, 195, 206 New York Herald, 90, 147–48, 206, 207 New York Journal, 313 New York News, 198 New York State Kansas Committee, 138 New York Times, 195, 196, 214 New York Tribune, 208 New York World, 200 Nichols, Matthias, 154 Nichols, Roy Franklin, 113, 121, 168, 174 Nile’s Weekly Register, 46 Nixon, Richard, 203, 207 The North American Review, 46 nullification, 187 number of rhetorical presidents, 19–20, 36



Oates, Stephen B., 5 Ohio, 256–57 Olbrechts-Tyteca, L., 75 Olcott, Charles, 314 Olney, Richard, 296–97, 302 Oregon boundary of, 103n31 and Britain, 88, 90, 92, 95 and election of 1876, 245 and Polk, 88, 90, 95 and slavery, 98 O’Sullivan, John L., 96, 308 pacification of the South, 247, 252, 255, 261, 262 Pacific bases, 312–13 Pakenham, Richard, 72, 75, 79 Panic of 1837, 47 Parker, Ely, 233 participatory democracy, 46 parties and partisanship and Buchanan, 177 and Hayes, 250, 252, 261 and Johnson, 195 and Revolution of 1840, 58 and rhetorical practices, 24–25, 26 tactical and strategic issues of, 31 See also specific political parties Party Ideologies in America (Gerring), 24 pathos-centered presidential rhetoric, 331–32 patronage system, 268 Patton, John, 48 Pendleton Act of 1883, 237 The People and the Presidency (Laracey), 2 Perelman, Chaim, 75 Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (Grant), 216–17, 218, 239 Peskin, Allan, 246 Pfau, Michael William, 5 Phelan, James, 85 Philadelphia Inquirer, 272 Philadelphia Press, 196 Philippines, 307, 308, 310, 311–13, 316–17, 321, 322



index

Phillips, Wendell, 206 Pierce, Franklin, 10, 106–65, 114 and abolitionism, 108, 112, 116, 117–18, 141–42, 143–44, 155 annual messages to Congress, 108, 126–27, 140–43, 150–57 and extremism, 107, 112–13, 116, 117–18, 154 farewell address, 108, 117 and Fugitive Slave Law, 108–13, 118–19, 122 inaugural address, 108, 122–26 and Kansas-Nebraska crisis, 136–38, 139–48, 150 leadership of, 127, 147, 148 “Position of the Democratic Party in 1852” (political cartoon), 118–19, 119 and powers of the presidency, 123–26, 131, 152 rhetorical practices, 20 and vague constitutionalism, 117–18, 120 and veto power, 131–35 Pierce, Jane Means Appleton, 114 Pierrepont, Edward, 235 Pinckney, Henry L., 49 Platt, Thomas, 268 policy emphasis of presidential rhetoric, 3, 6, 24, 40 political advocacy, 281–82 The Political Pulpit (Hart), 4 Polk, James K., 9–10, 83–105 and annexation of Texas, 77–78, 79 annual messages to Congress, 89–90, 91, 93, 95, 97 background, 84 and Civil War, 102 and Congress, 91–95 and election of 1844, 88, 111 and extremism, 107, 112–13 gubernatorial campaign, 86–87, 103n14 inaugural address, 91 and Jeffersonianism, 85–88

and Manifest Destiny, 75, 95–97 and Mexican War, 91, 92 and powers of the presidency, 88–95, 97, 101 and presidential newspaper, 22 and public opinion, 88–91, 95 rhetorical practices, 20 and slavery, 98–100 and veto power, 88–89, 93–94, 101, 102n8, 104n58 Polk Doctrine, 90, 103n32 Pollard, James, 92 Popular History of the United States (Bryant), 145 popular sovereignty, 136, 137, 141, 144, 154, 180–81 populist rhetoric, 293–94, 302–5 Porter, Horace, 218 “Position of the Democratic Party in 1852” (political cartoon), 118–19, 119 Postmaster General, 259 Potter, David, 98, 128 powers of the presidency. See executive powers Pratt, Julius W., 314 The Presidency and Rhetorical Leadership (Zarefsky), 2 The President as Interpreter-in-Chief (Stuckey), 4 presidential powers. See executive powers Presidents and the People: The Partisan Story of Going Public (Laracey), 18, 29–33 press, 26, 46, 259–60, 269, 300, 304. See also newspapers, presidential; specific publications property rights, 188 Protestantism, 58 public education, 266n39, 274–75, 279, 284 public memory, 271–74, 284, 285–86, 333 public opinion and Buchanan, 189 and the Civil War, 250 and Cleveland, 292 and elections, 179–81

index and the Hayes-Tilden election, 254 and limitations of rhetoric, 190 and Polk, 88–91, 95 power of, 44, 46 and the Pullman strike, 300 and representative government, 169 and slavery, 187–88 and Van Buren, 45 and Victorian liberalism, 304 Puerto Rico, 308, 311, 312 Pullman, George, 295–96 Pullman strike, 294–302 purpose of presidential rhetoric, 3 Quakers, 57, 233 Quay, Matthew, 268 radicalism, 107, 112–13, 155 radio, 26, 37 railroads and trains, 26, 134, 177, 235 rankings of presidents, 166–67 Rathbun, Lyon, 70, 104n64 Rating the Presidents (Ridings and McIver), 166 Ray, Isaac, 129 Reagan, Ronald, 214 Reardon, Carol, 272 Reconstruction and Federal Election Bill, 278 and Grant, 215, 248 and Harrison, 279 and Hayes, 244, 246, 248–49, 253, 255 pacification of the South, 247, 252, 255, 261, 262 and public memory, 274, 333 The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate (Wilson), 4 Reed, Joseph B., 37 Reed, Thomas B., 268 reformers and reform movement asylums for the insane, 129–35 development of, 47, 128 and Indian removal, 54–57 and Van Buren, 57–58 and Whig Party, 51



Reid, Whitelaw, 90 religion and Buchanan, 175–76 evangelicalism, 46, 51, 57 and gender, 47, 59–60n10 religious reformers, 54–57 Remini, Robert V., 5 representative democracy, 24, 169 Republic, 22 republicanism, 277, 279, 281, 284 Republicans and African Americans, 273 and Civil War, 280 and election of 1856, 149 and equal rights, 250 and Grant, 221, 228 and Harrison, 270, 271 and Hayes, 247–51, 252 and Johnson, 26, 200 and Kansas-Nebraska Act, 139, 140 and McKinley, 314 and Pierce, 142, 153–55 and Polk, 87 and rhetorical practices, 24–25 and southern pacification, 248 Resumption Act, 225 Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (Woodward), 246 Revolution of 1840, 58 “rhetorical compact” theory, 4 The Rhetorical Presidency (Tulis), 2, 18, 19, 30, 31, 33, 37, 45, 170, 291 Rhodes, James Ford, 136 Richardson, James, 63, 89 Richardson, William, 222, 235–36 Richmond Enquirer, 112 Richmond Sentinel, 199 Ridings, William J., Jr., 166 Ritchie, Thomas, 92, 93 Ritter, Kurt, 312 Rivers, William C., 65, 83 Rogers, Molton C., 172–75 role of presidents, 23–26, 27, 100



index

Roosevelt, Franklin D., 35, 38, 169 Roosevelt, Theodore and civil service reform, 264n8 and development of presidential rhetoric, 35, 309, 325 as first rhetorical president, 291, 305 Round Table, 210 Ryan, Halford, 2 Rynders, Isaiah, 110, 112 Sanborn, Richard, 235 Scaturro, Frank, 214 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 213–14 Schurman, Jacob, 313 Schurz, Carl, 259 scope of rhetoric, 3 Scott, Joan Wallach, 58–59 Scott, Winfield, 55, 121, 258 Seager, Robert, 67, 68 secession and Buchanan, 168, 185, 187, 189 and Comprise of 1850, 111 and Pierce, 157 and Toombs, 184 See also Civil War sectionalism, 181, 244, 251, 256–57 Sellers, Charles, 89, 93, 101, 147 Senate. See U.S. Congress separation of powers, 1, 170, 178, 186, 292 Sermons to Young Women (Fordyce), 59–60n10 Seward, William, 143 Sheridan, Philip, 229 Sherman, John, 153, 224 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 248 Sherman Anti-Trust Act, 267, 297 Sherman Silver Purchase Act, 267, 292 Siena Research Institute, 166 Sigourney, Lydia, 53 “Silliman” letter, 180–81 Simonton, Dean Keith, 217, 219 Simpson, Brooks D., 5, 214, 215 Slagell, Amy R., 11, 243–66 Slater Fund, 266n39 slavery and Buchanan, 174, 176, 184–85

and the Constitution, 119–20, 124 and Cuba, 227 and elections, 180–81 and emancipation, 252–53, 273 and expansionism, 122 and family metaphors, 181–84 and Grant, 227–28 and Harrison, 279 and Hayes, 257 and Kansas-Nebraska Act, 135–48, 150, 179, 180–81 and the Lecompton constitution, 178–79 and the Missouri Compromise, 173 and Pierce, 122, 124, 154, 155, 156 and Polk, 84, 98–100 and public opinion, 187–88 and safety-valve thesis, 73 and Texas, 70–71, 73, 74, 75, 77, 79, 98, 125, 176 and Tyler, 63–64 See also abolitionism; African Americans Smith, Charles Emory, 311, 312 Smith, Henry B., 265n36 Smith, Jean Edward, 214, 224, 225, 233, 234 Smith, Renee, 255 Smith, Truman, 117 Smith, William Henry, 265n36 Society of Friends, 48 South Carolina and African Americans, 229–30 and election of 1876, 245–46 and Hayes, 252, 259, 263 and nullification crisis of 1832–33, 139 and Reconstruction, 248 secession, 169, 181, 187 Southern Question, 270, 274–80, 282 Spain, 96, 232 Spanish-American War, 307–8, 310, 313, 315–20, 323, 324 speeches and annual messages to Congress, 38 and constitutional implications, 31, 40

index and defining parameters of presiden- tial rhetoric, 28n4 infrequency of, 37 written rhetoric vs., 2–3 spoils system, 236, 237–38, 264n8 spoken vs. written rhetoric, 2–3 Spooner, Lys ander, 155–56 Stampp, Kenneth, 149–50 Stanton, Edwin, 226 Stanton, Henry B., 57 State and Union, 198 state legislatures, 186 states’ rights and Cleveland, 298–302 and Harrison, 285 and Hayes, 248–49 and Kansas-Nebraska Act, 135 and Pierce, 123–26, 134, 135, 141–42, 152 and Polk, 84 and the Pullman strike, 295–302 steamboats, 26 Stein, Gertrude, 216–17 Stephens, Alexander, 100 Stevens, Thaddeus, 200, 206 strikes, 295–302 Strong, George Templeton, 146, 207, 208–209 Stuckey, Mary E., 2, 4 suffrage, 250, 278, 279, 281–82 Sumner, Charles, 142, 145–47, 151, 156, 206, 230 Sweetser, William, 129 “Swing Around the Circle” campaign, 202–203 tariffs, 88, 90–91, 286n8, 292, 309 Taylor, Zachary death of, 115 and election of 1848, 116 and Mexican War, 95, 96 and presidential newspaper, 22 rhetorical practices, 20 telegraph, 26 television, 26, 37



temperance movement, 47, 199 Tennessee, 100–101 Terrill, Robert E., 10, 166–93 Texas and Buchanan, 176 and Polk, 88, 89, 90, 95, 96, 104n64 and slavery, 70–71, 73, 74, 75, 77, 79, 98, 125, 176 and Tyler, 70–79, 88 and Whig Party, 122 Thirteenth Amendment, 249, 251, 333 Thomas Jefferson and the Rhetoric of Virtue (Golden and Golden), 4 Tilden, Samuel, 238, 244, 245, 261, 263 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 31 Toombs, Robert, 184 Topeka, Kansas, 176 Toucey, Isaac, 133–34 Trail of Tears, 55 trains and railroads, 26, 134, 177, 235 transportation, 26, 38, 46, 177 Treaty of Paris, 308, 314, 324 Trist, Nicholas, 97 Tulis, Jeffrey K., 3, 7, 29–33 challenges to theory, 2, 6, 18 on Cleveland, 291–93 conception of rhetoric, 28n4, 167, 170–71 on Constitution, 6, 39–40 on deliberative rhetoric, 302–3 on development of presidential rhetoric, 35–37 on eighteenth-century political culture, 329–30 on Founders’ distrust of masses, 45 impact of concepts, 35, 304–5 on Johnson, 18, 26, 36 on McKinley, 309 on “pre-rhetorical” presidencies, 189 on technological innovations, 169 on written messages, 40 Twain, Mark, 216 Tweed Ring, 235 two-party system, 79, 140



index

Tyler, John, 9, 63–84 and annexation of Texas, 70–79 annual messages to Congress, 69–70, 71, 72, 78 assumption of presidency, 63–66 and authority of the presidency, 68–69, 88 and Constitution, 75 and foreign affairs, 69–70 inaugural address, 66 and presidential newspaper, 21–22 rhetorical practices, 20 and slavery, 63–64 and veto power, 66–68 types of rhetoric, 29–33, 293 Union Pacific Railroad, 235 Union Safety Committee, 110 United States Review, 134 Updike, John, 167, 168–69, 175 Upshur, Abel P., 71, 77 U.S. Congress and annexation of Texas, 75–76, 78–79 and Buchanan, 171 and the English Bill, 192n48 and Fifteenth Amendment, 249–50 and Grant, 228–29, 232 and Harrison, 65 and Indian policy, 53 and Johnson, 26, 195 and lawmaking powers, 170 and Mexican War, 96–97 and policy rhetoric of presidents, 30 and Polk, 91–95 relationship of president with, 32, 39, 65–66, 88, 100, 309, 331 and representative democracy, 23–24 and role of presidents, 27 and separation of powers, 178 and slavery, 98 and Tyler, 65, 66–67, 69, 78–79 U.S. Constitution and Buchanan, 188 debate on adoption of, 32–33

and elections, 180, 181, 185, 186 and equal rights, 249–50 and Hayes, 244, 248–49, 251, 252, 256, 257, 261, 262, 263 and Pierce, 117–18, 133, 135 and representative democracy, 23 and separation of powers, 178–79, 292 and slavery, 119–20, 124, 137 and states’ rights, 186–87, 299 and Tyler, 75 on use of presidential rhetoric, 3 and veto power, 93–94 See also constitutional parameters of the presidency U.S. Department of the Treasury, 235 U.S. Navy, 267 U.S. Postal Service, 259, 297–98, 299 U.S. Supreme Court, 302, 303 Utah, 179 value of presidential rhetoric, 35 Van Buren, Martin, 8–9, 44–62 and abolitionism, 48–51 and annexation of Texas, 75, 77–78 annual messages to Congress, 54 on Constitution, 51 and election of 1848, 116, 133 inaugural address, 49–50 and Indian removal, 52–57 and mass democracy, 45–47 public opinion of, 47 on religious revivalism, 46–47 rhetorical practices, 20 and Texas, 70 women’s reaction to, 45 Vest, George, 313 vetoes and veto power and Grant, 223–24 and Hayes, 266n39 and Pierce, 131–35 as policy tool, 26–27 and Polk, 88–89, 93–94, 102n8, 104n58 and Tyler, 66–68

index Victorian liberalism, 303–5 voting, 179–81, 250, 278, 279, 281–82 Wade, Benjamin, 153, 156 Walker, Edwin, 297, 302 Walker, Robert, 72–73, 77, 91 Wall Street, 129 Wall Street Journal, 166 Ward, Samuel Ringgold, 109–10, 112, 113, 118, 136 Washburn, Israel, Jr., 153–54 Washington, George annual messages to Congress, 38–39 and black soldiers, 225 and Congress, 39 and constitutional parameters of the presidency, 330 Farewell Address, 38, 99, 227 inaugural address, 38–39, 40 rhetorical practices, 2, 3, 38–39, 41, 41n7, 330 scholarship on, 5 on U.S. Constitution, 256 Washington Globe, 21 Washingtonian Temperance Society, 199 Washington National Intelligencer, 195 Washington Union, 22, 92, 136 “weak” presidency, 32 Webster, Daniel and annexation of Texas, 71 death of, 122 and election of 1852, 121 moderation of, 111–12, 118 and Tyler, 65, 68, 69 on U.S. Constitution, 256 and women’s support, 58 Webster, Sidney, 126–27 Webster-Ashburton Treaty, 69, 70 Welch, Richard, 291 Welter, Rush, 124 Whigs and annexation of Texas, 70, 73, 75, 77–78, 122–23 and Comprise of 1850, 111



and election of 1852, 121 and Hayes, 250 and Indian policy, 57 and Kansas-Nebraska Act, 139, 140 and Lincoln, 50, 51 and Mexican War, 97 and Pierce, 112, 121 and Polk, 83 and Revolution of 1840, 58 and rhetorical practices, 24–25 and Tyler, 64, 65, 67–68 and Van Buren, 45, 47 women’s support of, 47, 57–58 Whiskey Ring, 235 Whitman, Walter, 106, 107, 115, 129–30 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 109, 110, 111–12, 118, 136 Wiley, Earl, 5 Wilson, James, 32 Wilson, Kirt H., 4, 11–12, 267–88 Wilson, Major L., 51 Wilson, Woodrow annual messages to Congress, 38, 39 and Constitutional Government, 27 and development of presidential rhetoric, 35 and Treaty of Versailles, 30 and Tulis’s construct, 291, 305 Winfield, John, 138, 143 Wisconsin State Kansas Emigrant Aid Society, 138 Wise, Henry A., 21–22 Woman’s Day Chart of the Presidents of the United States, 213 women and abolitionism, 47, 48, 61n23 as audience of presidential rhetoric, 331 and Indian removal, 52–53 opposition to Van Buren, 45 and reform movement, 47 and religion, 47, 59–60n10 and Whig Party, 47, 57–58 Wood, Gordon S., 5, 23

 Woodward, C. Van, 246 Works of James Buchanan (Moore), 168 Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, 205 Zaeske, Susan, 8–9, 44–62 Zarefsky, David, 63–84

index on Buchanan, 180–81 on development of presidential rhetoric, 2 on Lincoln, 4, 5 on Tyler, 9